When i was flushing my localhost I was getting an error saying could not connect to the db trying to use my remote connection string. It turns out that because I had a file remoteCopy_of_configure.php that SS was trying to "compile" that and use it a the connection. I changed the name to _configureLocal.php and SS no longer tries to use it.

Is there a better way to sync remote and local?

When uploading from Windows to Linux their is a problem with db names. Because Windows is not case sensitive phpmyadmin exports the table names all in lower case. What I ended up doing was build the db remotely, the exporting the data only locally, then search and replacing every table name to CamelCase.

Is there any easier way?

check out http://doc.silverstripe.com/doku.php?id=debug. You can set you localhost server to a dev server ( Director::set_dev_servers() ) and then use Director::isLive() and Director::isDev() to use different _config.php files