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Thursday, June 1, 2006
If you have two or more Macs on a network that you commonly need to copy files to and fro, then you’ve probably set up a few aliases to network drives to help with your file transfers. But setting those up and maintaining them after system boots and all can be a pain in rear. Macs are suppose to be easy. So what gives?
Don’t worry, be happy. DropCopy is here and it’s free. With DropCopy, from the very cooly named 10base-t company, you can copy files by simply dragging your files to a faint black dot on your desktop. Once you “touch” the black hole, a pop-up list of all the other Macs running DropCopy pops up. Either user name or computer appear…or both. The file starts copying itself to the dropped user/computer and a progress meter starts ticking off. Once completed, you will hear (if chosen in the preferences) confirmation and your dropped host will now have that file. Piece of cake. Kind of.
While testing the freeware application, SvenOnTech found one MacBook Pro on our network that would not appear in DropCopy on either our other MacBook Pro or our Mac mini. We did everything. Even though the firewall on the troubling MBP was off, we added the suggested port to both TCP and UDP. We restarted the File Sharing service. We disconnected from AirPort and reconnected. We changed the domain to match the other two units. Man, we did it all but still, nothing. Now here’s the kicker, the problematic MBP could see us and it was able to copy a file over. No problem for him. So we know it’s something on his MBP. We blame his Boot Camp install.
So what ever the reason, no biggy. He’ll be leaving our network Sunday and he can figure out the problem when he gets back to Texas. Maybe there it’ll work for him. Heck, maybe we’ll be able to get the Internet option to work (wouldn’t that be ironic?).
We are indeed happy that this does work on the two Macs that really need it. Getting our old PowerBook to jump into the fun would be great, too! In the end, this is a free utility and outside of that one Texas bandit, this works. We’re happy. Really, we are.
Update: We spoke to 10base-t about the problem with our MacBook Pro not wishing to show himself and based on our conversation with them, it sounds like the MBP in question may be having Bonjour issues. We do know that DropCopy does work for two reasons. One, he (the MBP) can see all of our DropCopy hosts on the network and, two, when we added him as a Local Host (manual host addition), we successfully transferred files to his MacBook Pro. So, it would appear that this is not a DropCopy issue. Just keep this in mind if you experience the same issue.
June 2nd, 2006 at 6:56
He’s probably enabled Stealth Mode on his MBP.
June 2nd, 2006 at 9:11
That would be one possible reason; however, both the firewall is OFF and that setting is disabled. So that’s not it, either. But thank you for the suggestion.
June 2nd, 2006 at 9:34
DropCopy (not DriveCopy) is only free for up to three Macs. For more, you have to pay the $25 shareware fee. I did so, and I’m pretty happy. The only drag is that DropCopy can’t really handle files bigger than about a Mb. For that I use SharePoints, which allows you to access the *entire* hard drive of another Mac. That’s $25, but it’s incredible.
June 8th, 2006 at 11:50
Thanx Patherto for the tip…and the name mix up on our part (oops.) Odd, we got it right after the second paragraph.
DropCopy will let you do transfers larger than 1 MB; however, they will need to be zipped up first. we tested this by sending over a 380 MB file from our MBP to the other MBP and had no problems.