Keeping a desktop and laptop in sync Wednesday, November 14 2007

Recently I've been becoming more and more frustrated with my laptop. It's not that it's slow. Far from it as it's a Toshiba M7 Tablet PC with Intel Core Duo T2500 with 2GB RAM. It's just it's not as much as a desktop replacement as I'd like, so I've decided to go back to having a desktop with my laptop simply enabling me to be mobile. So later this week I should be running on a new machine with the new Intel Core 2 Quad processor and 4GB RAM along with a 150GB Western Digital Raptor drive running at 10,000rpm. That's more like it. :)

So, to the point then. One thing that's really important is that I can keep my files synchronized between the two machines so I am never without my music, photos and various other files. I have too much to want to manually manage it, so I've been looking around at various programs that do this for me. One I have taken a look at is https://www.foldershare.com/ and http://www.beinsync.com/ is another. Neither seem to fully do what I want, although they're pretty close, but I'm sure there's more out there that I haven't found yet. If you have any experiences with this, I'd love to hear about them.

7 comment(s) so far

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Nick wrote on January 23, 2008

You should try the windows sync.  Works wonderfully in vista.  Just set up a shared drive on the laptop that is mapped to a folder or drive on your desktop. This is how my laptop and desktop are kept sync'd

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RichMercer wrote on January 23, 2008

Thanks Nick, I'll have a look, but I'd like something to sync to identical location on each computer, so I'll see how many I need syncing and see what happens. I don't want to end up managing loads of shares.

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Kevin Harder wrote on January 23, 2008

Hey Rich,

Check out Windows Home Server.  It's in a public RC status right now.  I've been using it since beta 2 at home and love it.  It only needs very minimal hardware specs - simple graphcis, cpu, and low memory - just lots of hard drive storage space.

You can keep most of your data (music, movies, docs) on the Home Server box where's its replicated for safety, and access them via shares from your Desktop and Laptop.  Vista has great syncing abilities to make the shares are avialble offline on the laptop and sync them when it's back on the network.

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RichMercer wrote on January 23, 2008

I like the idea of that Kevin, but it seems live overkill to me. It means running a whole other machine all the time, which is something I don't really need. It does look good, and if there were more people in the house, maybe I'd do it. I want something a little more lightweight than that.

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Aarti Vaid wrote on January 23, 2008

OK, so I'm tooting my own horn here a bit but I think you'll really like PCsync. It's built to do EXACTLY what you're looking for - not overkill but still comprehensive enough to give you customization options. Let me know if you'd like a complimentary download to try out. :)

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C. Marwitz wrote on January 23, 2008

Any updates on what you finally chose for a sync solution?

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RichMercer wrote on January 23, 2008

Yes, I've now settled for FolderShare that is now a Microsoft product. It's free and works very, very well. So far I'm very happy with it!

https://www.foldershare.com/

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