Tips for Synchronized Living

For the past 8 months I have been working on 2 different machines: Laptop with XP and a desktop running Vista. Since November I have swapped my XP laptop for a Macbook. During that time I have had to work on both these machines at the same time. Macbook at work, desktop at home and  before that, XP at the Uni and desktop at home. I imagine that I am not the only one using more than one computer at the same time. So, without further ado, here are my tips for synchronized living.

In general, I try to use online services as opposed to installed software, this makes life a whole lot easier. It means that your data is accessible from any internet connected computer but it also means that you need to be online to be able to access it. I am hardly ever disconnected though and it hasn’t been a problem yet.

Files
But how about sharing files between two (or more) computers? A few recommendations:
First thing to do is make sure you can access and see the other computers files and folders. There are several guides online to help you with this.
Syncback is a great tool for backing up and synchronizing folders. Share both folders on both machines and sync them with Syncback.
SyncToy from Microsoft also does an excellent job of making sure two folders are identical.

Browser
Now, filesharing is handy but what about browser history and passwords?
Google Browser Sync works great on Firefox and Flock and will sync your bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords.
Opera 9.5 has a built in sync feature that works great. The browser itself is pretty fast and stable.
Mozilla Weave attempts to do the same, but it is still in alpha development.
These solutions work on Vista, XP and OSX.

Calendar
I have written about Calendar synchronization before but there is also a very handy tool that lets you very easily sync between iCal and Google Calendar called Spanning Sync. I have tried it and it really works great.

Mail
For mail synchronization it is very handy if you use Gmail with IMAP enabled.

Tags: sync, browser, calendar, vista, xp, google, osx, synchronizing