Working on more than one Mac – and an iPad

[Rosemary Taylor]

I have three Macs here, a Mac mini which is the main computer plus a MacBook for doing things elsewhere in the house or when away. There is also an older iMac out in my “studio” and an iPad for good measure. The problem is that I use all of these from time to time and so I want to make sure Nitro works well between them all.

The easiest answer, of course, is to use Apple iCloud Photos. That would sync between all devices and Nitro would just work off the Photos library. But my network is slow so I prefer not to upload all my RAW files to the cloud (do I cull them to save space or not?). Also I have found the sync to be a little bit hit or miss at times. There are advantages but at the end of the day I like to have everything saved in folders on a disk here at home with several regular backups, including to Backblaze. And I do like the new hierarchical keywords which do not work in Photos.

So I have tried three other options:

1. Using iCloud Files. In my first test this worked really well as I could choose what to sync down depending on the storage of each device. When I tried scaling it up though I hit sync issues. Two Macs had synched but one hadn’t and nothing would persuade it to either. It can sort of work with the iPad too.

2. Using a Synology NAS with the Drive sync app. This sort of worked but I was never quite sure it had been successful. Doesn’t work well with the iPad.

3. Using Chronosync with the Mac mini as the source photo archive. Here I can run validated syncs exactly when I need them and at full LAN speed. There is no automatic space recovery but I can sync to external drives on the iMac if needed and just a subset to the MacBook. This method gives reassurance. For the iPad I could push files through iCloud if needed or else use an external drive. Oh yes, a bonus is that I can sync the Nitro presets, lens profiles and keywords using Chronosync too.

4. Frisby net! (we used to call exchanging CDs and floppies this). I tried using an external disk but wasn’t happy with it not being backed up automatically.

So my feeling is that I will go with option 3 as that gives me the most piece of mind.

Any other ideas or thoughts?

[Rosemary Taylor]

… peace of mind.

I swear that was due to autocorrect!

[Nik Bhatt]

I have received some reports about NAS issues with iOS / iPadOS, but the same NAS works fine with the Nitro on the Mac. Personally, I have found that a Mac mini acting as a server works fine with Nitro on iPads, so that could be option 4 – use the Mac mini as a file server / turn on file sharing.

Otherwise, of your above options, I would agree that #3 is your best bet given that your LAN is fast, but your WAN is slow (and iCloud is squirrely).

The external disk could be okay too – it could be backed up regularly by setting up a backup script / service on your mini and periodically taking the drive back to the Mini, where the backup system would then run.

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