Welcome to the club! I've tried thinking about this for many many years... You best bet is to run your workstation in a VM and put your data files on a mount t

Welcome to the club! I've tried thinking about this for many many years... You best bet is to run your workstation in a VM and put your data files on a mount to the underlying file system and then run Unison file sync across the two file sets (the VM image(s) and the files). Putting all your files inside the VM will work as well - but copy times will be longer because the whole thing will be bigger. With your bandwidth limitations anything magical is out of the question; live file sync is an attractive idea but it's too slow for large file sets - Dropbox, Lsyncd, Git Annex - all suffer when dealing with a lot of files across low bandwidth. Unison, on the other hand, works well with a USB key as the transport mechanism - and only runs when you ask it to - so it doesn't keep transferring files as you change them (which seems like a good idea - but is really a PITA when you're not actually sharing files with other people). Going a bit fantastical here - but IMHO the gold standard is block level sync with DRDB - which will keep two or more systems identical at all times; but it's too heavyweight for your purposes. More practically, just install the same software on both your workstations and sync your data and dot files (e.g. .home) with Unison. This is what I have been doing for over 5 years - and it works really well.