The 60GB FireLite I ordered arrived last Friday. Very small. Very light. Very fast. Mind-blowing capacity.

The key question is whether it will prove to be an indispensable tool for insuring that I always have the latest copies of my work at hand (and backed up), or yet another bucket of potentially out of sync bits...

Ideally, I'd like to have it automatically sync with each of the machines I work with upon connection, and I've been looking at some possible ways of scripting this. rsync came immediately to mind, and there is a resource-fork-aware variant for Mac OS X called rsyncX. Tools like these work fine if you remember to sync frequently and faithfully and always know which direction you're going in (i.e. computer-to-FireWire-drive or vice versa). But what they do really boils down to a "merge" that doesn't take any information about previous state into account. To do a true bidirectional sync that can cope gracefully with changes possibly occurring on both ends (à la Palm HotSync) requires keeping some additional state around between sync operations, and applying that information when it's time to do the next sync. (e.g. If a given file exists at A but not at B, and the sync engine knows that the file existed in both places following the most recent sync, it can deduce that the file was removed from B, and that it should therefore remove the file from A rather than copying it from A to B.)

A quck versiontracker search turned up Synchronize! X and ExecutiveSync at the apparent top of the heap of tools that can do true bidirectional syncs, and I'm giving these a look now.