I've been thinking about this for at least 1 month now, trying to figure out the best way to deal with MC on different computers for different purposes.
My laptop is the main computer in that it has all of my data (which can't be accessed from the other computers) and it is the one where I do all the tagging.
Computer 2 is in the living room and it has all the music and most videos.
Computer 3 is in the basement cinema and has all the movies.
That's the main setup.
I have found myself importing everything on the laptop, backing up and restoring to the other computers. That works fine but for 3 important things:
1. I lose all "last played" info, which means that all my "movies we've seen" or "music we've heard lately" view schemes are for nothing
2. doing a backup and then restore on 2 other computers almost daily is a pain
3. Some other settings are lost which is difficult to remember to put back, especially server type settings (we need at least the living room computer to be a server for gizmo), and I always have to change the audio output. I constantly forget to do both things. The cinema computer may be the most complicated because once we set it up to watch movies (we haven't yet) there may be lots of video configurations that need to be customized -- hence recustomized after each restore).
LIbrary server is great, and I tried that for a while, but the tagging issue is preventing that from being a good solution for me.
I thought of perhaps just having each computer have it's own distinct library for just its local content, but the tagging issue again.
I thought of a new plan a few minutes ago. What if I just keep the main database on my laptop like I always used to, re-create it on the two other computers (fields and all), restore the database once, and then have all three computers set to auto-import all content all the time? That way I tag everything on the laptop, move it where it goes, and the other two computers eat it up automatically? Then all computers should stay up to date with what all the others ones have. Are there any issues with this I'm not seeing right now?