Until recently I had thousands of files located in the My Documents folder on my laptop, with almost the same files in the Documents folder of my iMac, and with almost the same files in the My Documents folder in the Windows partition (Boot Camp partition) accessible via a virtual machine on my iMac. And then of course there were backups of these.
Sounds like a bit much, doesn’t it?
Turns out that “managing” all of this had become a bit of a thorn in my side. I had modified some documents on the Mac, some on the laptop, and some on the Windows partition on the Mac. This had not gotten to the point that it had caused a problem, but it easily could have.
Well, two computer problems within the past month have forced me into to dealing with this mess. The first was a few weeks ago: my laptop began dying, periodically crashing and almost not recovering, so I made sure that the Windows partition on my Mac had all of the latest files from the laptop. I figured I’d stick with it for my “Windows stuff” and would see how long I could without a laptop.
Then, last week, my Boot Camp partition became corrupted. I may write a separate article detailing that, but for now, let’s just say it caused me to go ahead and order a laptop. Tax time was fast approaching and I needed a reliable machine to deal with it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to install Windows on the Mac again.
But, after a couple of days of waiting and realizing that the new laptop might not arrive in time for taxes, I went ahead and erased the Boot Camp partition and then reinstalled Windows. This time the installation was with Parallels Desktop 4, which set up its own partition. No more Boot Camp partition to deal with.
In doing this, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Parallels had shared all of the files in my Mac’s Documents folder with the Windows My Documents folder. Both systems were using the same files! I loved this, as it simplified matters a good bit.
To make the simplification complete, I did a comparison of all of these files with a backup I had made of the old laptop’s files, and copied new stuff to my Mac’s Documents folder, where they are available for the Mac and for the Parallels Desktop partition. Cool. I feel much better now.
But, what will I do when the new laptop arrives? I am not sure, yet. One possibility is set up an in-home file server. Maybe I could reformat the drive on my older laptop, and load a new Linux system on it, and use it as a file server, and get away from having Documents folders on each machine. Perhaps I could sync all the files to a Web service, and use the Web service as my main file resource. I’m not sure. I don’t want to make it more complicated than it needs to be.
Anyway, I feel better having at least a partial consolidation of my filing, and thought I’d share the story with you. Makes me wish I had gone with a Parallels Desktop (or VMware Fusion) approach from the start, instead of having a Boot Camp partition. (I did start using VMware Fusion months ago, but it worked off the Boot Camp partition, so it needed that partition to have its own document files.)
Thanks for sharing this. My laptop is about to kick it. I have contemplated laboriously about making the jump to a mac after 5 computers and about 12 years using windows exclusively. I will need to dual boot for work and some for school.
Can you boot to the parallels partition at startup via bootcamp?
Whichever way I go (I am struggling between a macbook pro and a sony vaio Z series) I will have 2 older computers to re-purpose. Even a few years ago, I never would have thought that a network within my own home was necessary or even possible.
Hi Tyler, Good to hear from you again.
With Parallels Desktop you can actually run Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously: you run Windows as a virtual machine within OS X via Parallels Desktop. (An alternative to Parallels Desktop is VMware Fusion … I prefer Parallels, personally.) You don’t even need a Boot Camp partition. In fact, my recommendation is to do without one.
Let me know if I didn’t answer your question properly and I’ll try again.
I feel for you with your laptop dying. The death of mine kinda came out of nowhere and surprised me. After a lot of chkdsk operations I managed to get it to where it works for about 15 – 30 minutes at a time (it was crashing on startup), and I don’t what got it into that shape, because I always take good care of my computers (regularly defragging, etc.). I was tempted to do without a laptop since I really don’t travel anymore, but feel almost naked without one.