I’m running several WordPress installs on my desktop machine using XAMPP. I would like to move them to my laptop as well. Can I simply copy the htdocs, mysql and phpMyAdmin directories to the laptop, replacing the ones from the new install? What if I copied everything in the directory structure under XAMPP?
Will this work, or will everything go gruesomely wrong? If so, what is the right way?
UPDATE – Tried copying the desktop files to the laptop. A combination of lack of sleep, XP to Windows 7 and bad juju made this a case of epic fail. To get things done quickly, I resorted to doing an XML export and reinstalling my theme on the laptop in order to do the demo.
From personal experience sync between two different computers work best in one direction. For example your desktop is primary and notebook is precise mirror (yep, of whole directory tree preferably with tool that doesn’t touch unchanged files). Two way sync gets messy very fast for web stack.
If you need to actively work with same stack on different computers it is easier to keep portable stack on external media (like external hard drive or flash drive) and just plug it. Don’t forget solid backup routine (which you should have in any case) or if external thingie dies – you lose whole stack.
PS another idea is to use something like Dropbox, but I hadn’t tried that in practice yet.