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24Jun/090

Staying In Sync

What do you use to keep multiple computers in sync? I think I've got a pretty good toolset down. Here's what I use...

Mail: Google Apps for Your Domain IMAP access. Same mail on my phone, both computers and on the web.

Calendar: Google Calendar. Sync tools or ActiveSync access are available for virtually every platform.

Bookmarks: XMarks (formerly FoxMarks). Google had a plug-in for FireFox that worked great, but they've stopped development. XMarks now has IE support.

Documents: Windows Live Sync (formerly FolderShare) works very well for a subset of our documents -- its PC and Mac, despite its new name. Mozy back-ups archived stuff.

Media: iTunes sync/sharing with our iPhones and the AppleTV for music and movies. iPhoto pushes to Flickr and Facebook, and I keep a manual back-up as well. A UPnP service running on the media computer lets us share content with the XBox and PS3.

Until recently I was using Plaxo for keeping my Contacts in Sync, but they've killed their offering by making it a "Premium" service. Now I'm stuck manually exporting my Google Mail Contacts to CSV and importing them into Outlook periodically until someone comes up with a better option -- there's a few out there, none work well.

Side rant about MobileMe: I tried to hard to make a go of it, but the service just sucks. iDisk is abysmally slow -- especially when compared to DropBox or Windows Live Sync. Calendar syncing is all or nothing... so its nothing. Only the Contacts sync works well -- but not $100 a year well.

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