Keeping things in sync…

I remember the days before the Internet – in fact, I remember the days when a PC was a solitary affair, even at the largest corporations. Much of my early career (in the 1980’s!) was spent as the “tech guy” accompanying the sales people on calls, explaining exactly why it was that a company would want to connect their computers together.

Those days are long past us, thank goodness, and every day new reasons to have your computers connected – now to the Internet – become apparent.

One of those reasons that I’ve been using various forms of over the last year or so is keeping things in sync between different computers. By doing so, important files etc. are available no matter which computer you’re using – and as a side effect, are backed up so that you don’t have to separately deal with the whole backup/restore thing. Lose a computer – or, say, upgrade a Windows XP computer to Windows 7, and all you need to do to restore is subscribe it to however you were sync’ing the files, and voila, they’re back.

I often wonder what other people are doing in this area. Are you using one of the online backup systems like Carbonite (a trial of which came with my Acer netbook), or are you using something specifically designed for multiple system sync’ing like Windows Live Sync or Live Mesh?

Personally, I’m using both Windows Live Sync & Live Mesh. I initially started my foray into Internet-based sync’ing with Foldershare – the forerunner to Windows Live Sync. I find it ideal for sync’ing non-document files – specifically, things like my Internet Explorer Favorites that I do a lot of reading from – and occasional changes/additions, but don’t really interact with as documents.

For documents, I really like Mesh – partly because of the Live Desktop that allows me to access & work with them even on computers that I wouldn’t want to sync them all to (or can’t because I don’t have permissions to install software on them). I also really like the “News” feature where I can see what changes the system has noticed.

And, of course, Mesh also has that whole remote “Connect to device” thing … which is a topic for another day.