Hi,
My son lives part of the week in my house and part of the week in his mother’s house.
Tired of lugging a heavy PC tower every week, I’ve built him an identical PC and cloned the HDDs. So now there is one PC in each house.
Running Windows 10.
He wants changes made to one PC to be made on the other PC too. Especially game saves, etc. Ideally, software installations as well.
Is that possible with this program, and could anyone please mansplain the steps I need to take?
Thanks
Keeping the whole system in sync will be hard or impossible with this tool. Especially since installation of software on Windows involves changes to the registry, a global database used by the system to keep track of things. Trying to sync that will probably fail or worst case, mess up the Windows installation.
Another thing to remember is that Syncthing needs to be online on both systems at the same time, which sounds unlikely in your situation. There is no intermediary (unless you specifically set up some always-on device) to relay the changes between systems that aren’t powered on simultaneously.
If you solve that issue though, it would work well for the actual user data, like documents and pictures, etc. Maybe even savegames, if the game is closed on both sides during synchronization.
Contacting me or his mother to turn his PC on isn’t a problem, so that syncing can happen.
How does this software work, does it only sync folders selected in the program? I’m using the windows executable as I want a GUI.
I selected a folder on one and it did appear on the other PC, but in the wrong place - everything gets put on the other PC in users/***** folder.
Oddly, I installed Asus Armoury on one PC then later I saw it in the Start menu of the other PC. I didn’t think it was on there previously. When I clicked on it in the start menu, it brought up the installation window and I was able to install it.
Am I missing something?
I have a similar setup–syncing 2 machines that I want to run the same app and/or open the same file. However, installation paths will often differ. My solution was after setting up the folders I want to sync, I then mapped the same drive letter at each location so the paths look the same.
Yes.
Each Syncthing device can sync to its own choice of folders, i.e. two endpoints don’t have to have the same destination drive/folder.
By default, Syncthing chooses the home folder for the user running Syncthing. So if the username is “bob”, the default folder might be C:\Users\bob\Sync.
Because the two PCs are identical, including the cloned HDDs, it’s likely due to ASUS’ software. It has a cloud services feature linking ASUS devices together for managing device settings. It’s not Syncthing that’s doing it.
Doesn’t seem like it.
As @acolomb explained, syncing game saves is doable, but will require some work. Some games save settings in the Windows Registry and some games offer the option to export saves for backup.
It might not work for every game, but a handy tool is CloneApp: https://github.com/builtbybel/CloneApp
CloneApp isn’t meant to clone an entire program (except programs that were designed to be portable). It helps simplify and automate the process of capturing program settings from the Windows Registry, .ini files, etc.
You built two PCs and cloned the drives – doesn’t sound like mansplaining is necessary. 
A suggestion…
Since it sounds like your son’s PC might be powerful enough to handle it, depending on time/effort you’d be willing to spend, one possible solution is to build a virtual machine (aka. “VM”) and sync the VM between the two PCs.
Power down the VM on one PC, let Syncthing / rsync / Rclone (or some other sync tool) sync it to the other PC. The same thing happens in the other direction.
Because the games, their settings, and so on are contained inside the VM (running Windows or Linux), it’ll be identical whether your son is at your home or his mother’s.
There have been quite a number of earlier posts on this forum about syncing VMs and/or large files that might be helpful:
A few things to check out and research online:
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