I've been playing Minecraft for a while and after doing some travelling, I've ran into the issue where I'd like to syncronize my Minecraft saves across computers.

I already use git for software version control, so why not shoehorn Minecraft into it? Not only would I get easy syncronization, I would also get version control so if I seriously mung something up, I can revert back to a previous save! Here's how I did it.

First, I had to make sure git was installed on all of my machines. Luckily on Linux git is usually provided in the package repository (git-core), but since my desktop also runs Windows (for gaming), I use msysgit. For example, on Debian/Ubuntu all you need to do is:

sudo apt-get install git-core

Once git was installed, I decided to go with a centralized approach since I want one 'official' spot where I can push and pull my Mincraft saves to. I already have a server from the wonderful folks at Linode, so I just initialized a bare (centralized) repository on there:

cd /path/to/repos/minecraft
git init --bare

Then, since I already have Minecraft installed on my desktop with quite a few saves, I had to clone the central repository, add my saves, commit, and then push back to the central repository.

cd /home/nick/.minecraft/
git clone [email protected]:/path/to/repos/minecraft temp
mv temp/.git ./

Since you can't clone a repository into a non-empty folder, I had to clone it to a temporary folder and then copy the .git folder from there into my .minecraft folder. Now that my local repository was setup, I added the files I wanted to syncronize.

git add saves screenshots stats texturepacks options.txt servers.dat
git commit -m 'Initial commit'

Once I had the files commited, all I needed to do was push them up to the central repository on my server.

git push

And now I have my Minecraft files in a central spot! Now every time I'm done playing a bit, all I have to do to sync my files up is:

git commit -a -m 'Played a bit'
git push

Now, on other machines, all I need to do is clone once, git pull before playing, and then commit and push when I'm done playing!

Easy peasy. Of course, you can do more fancy things with git since it's a full-blown version control system. If you feel inlined to play with those features, go read some documentation.