My test laptop – a 2012 HP Pavilion g6 – is dying. The past couple of OpenBSD installs resulted in kernel panics, and now the keyboard and touchpad keep failing. I’ve replaced the keyboard twice, and now it’s mostly the ribbon connector between the keyboard and the motherboard. I have to pop the bottom off the laptop, take out a screw, then pry the keyboard off and re-seat the cable. It’s probably the same kind of thing with the touchpad.

Now that I’m running a new Debian 10 Buster laptop and use Dropbox to sync 160 GB of personal files, I have turned to the open-source, Go-coded Syncthing to keep about 500 MB of work-related files mirrored across that Linux laptop, a Windows 7 desktop and a 2011-era iMac desktop. It’s all pretty much seamless. I have the Syncthing client running on each PC, and I can monitor the “state” of the sync via a web GUI.