Some people are still bringing laptops to work simply
to be able to work both at home and work.  The concern seems to be:

"If I do not bring a laptop to work, how do I transfer the files to my
home so that I can work at night?  I know I can use SSH File Transfer, but
if I modify many files, I won't remember all the files that need to be
transferred."

However, this is not a valid concern.  There are tools to synchronize complete
directories.  I was told that unison is the best choice. 

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

This was written as a result of Ben Pierce's research as a tool for
synchronizing two sets of data; unlike rsync it synchronizes both
rather than assuming a single source and a single copy.  Of course,
CVS and similar source control utilites also serve this purpose, as
well as allowing more than 2 copies to be synchronized, providing
version history and so forth.

However, since I have been using rsync, below I focus on rsync only.
Some features are:

(a) It is efficient because only the changed parts
need to be transferred over the network.
(b) This scheme works both on Windows and on Unix.  On
Windows you need to install Cygwin.
(c) You always have three copies. Furthermore, your home account on
denali is backed up by the systems.  So your data is safe whichever
hard drive fails.
(d) You can choose not to type in password for the rsync command.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/donghui/howto/ssh_rsync_without_passwd.txt
(e) You can check which files changed if you are not sure, without actually
performing the synchronization.  To do so, replace all occurrences of "rsync"
in the scripts below with "rsync -n"

The following are the actions you should do:

- Choose a directory, e.g. /home/yourlogin/data, and make sure it
exists in three places: denali, your office desktop, and your home
desktop. They contain exactly the same data typically.

- When you arrive home, the first thing you do is to run "checkout"
script:

---------------------------
date
echo "rsync --delete -avz denali.ccs.neu.edu:data /home/yourlogin"
rsync --delete -avz denali.ccs.neu.edu:data /home/yourlogin
---------------------------

This guarantees that your home desktop will have exactly the same content
as on denali.  (Of course, only content in /home/yourlogin).

- Before you go to bed, the last thing you do is to run "checkin" script:

----------------------------
date
echo "rsync --delete -avz /home/yourlogin/data denali.ccs.neu.edu:"
rsync --delete -avz /home/yourlogin/data denali.ccs.neu.edu:
----------------------------

to make sure whatever you worked at home is pushed onto denali.

- The same two steps are performed at work.