Synchronize Your Life
If your like me, you have more than one computer. I have at least 6 computers that I use on a daily basis – 9 if you count the ones that I use off and on while I am traveling and away from home or office. Don't get me started with shared calendars with my wife's' computers too. Keeping your contacts, emails, calendar, and bookmarks in sync can be a real pain in the you know what.
Fortunately I have found a suite of tools that allow me to keep synced at all times across all of my computers both at home and at work. I wish there were a single application to rule them all, but for now at least there is hope that with a little elbow grease it can be done.
Note: Not all of these tools will work for everyone and it may depend on how flexible you are on any given system. I will try to point out alternate pieces of software that might work as a substitute if one is available.
Google for (almost) Everything
Most of the tools I have found work with Google. Googles free hosted email service totally rocks for spam filtering and has become one of the central hubs for keeping everything in sync. I used google for syncing everything, however they stopped updating their Browser Sync application for FireFox so I had to find an alternate.
Syncing Bookmarks
On the topic of bookmark synchronization. Many people use a social bookmarking service like Delicious (formerly Del.icio.us) I tried to but didn't like it personally. I guess I like folders?
Foxmarks is an excellent free service with a syncing plugin that allows bookmarks to to be saved on their server.
Syncing Safari and FireFox is pretty easy by using Bookdog for OSX. ($19.95) This little application can do quite a lot more than just sync
Syncing IE and Firefox can be done with Plain Old Favorites. An alternate application I found was BookKit that works basically the same way as Foxmarks, so that might be a better solution — though I haven't tried it yet.
Synchronized Email with IMAP
One of the biggest reasons I switched to Googles free hosted email service was for IMAP. IMAP works like Microsoft Exchange for those familiar with that at your office. It allows all of your mail to synced with all of your computers. This includes your trash, sent email, drafts, inbox, etc. If you send an email from the web it shows up on your computers and your iPhone in the sent box and visa-versa. Whoot! Now that as nice.
Let me also explain something that has confused a number of people in regards to googles hosted services. Though you can do all of this with their free gmail accounts, It is not required to have a gmail account. I have my visual28.com email address though google and only involved a few changes to DNS. Your host can make these changes very easily for you if you ask them too. You can keep your regular domain email address, and just change where it is being stored. Google has a step by step guide when you sign up.
Synchronize Calendars and Contacts
I have only found two ways of syncing calendars on the mac. MobileMe (formally .mac $99.00 per year) or Spanning Sync ($25.00 a year or $65.00 For life) However, right now they are offering a $5.00 discount if you use the discount code A9ECBY. Currently only the 2.0 beta release syncs your contacts as well as your calendar. But it worked for me without too many problems. I had a few duplicates that I had to delete but other than that It's perfect.
Synchronization between Outlook and Google can be done with gSync. ($9.99) gSyncit is a Microsoft Outlook add-in that allows for two-way synchronization between Google and Outlook calendars. Not a bad app for less than $10.00.
The Kitchen Sync
In this section I wanted to toss out some other applications that I use to get at my content from computer to computer. These are not necessairly Syncing tools but in a world where I need access to all of my stuff all of the time I thought I would throw it out there and let you decide if it was valuable to you.
Music Library: I can access my entire iTunes music library both online (free) and on my iPhone ($20.00 plugin) using Dot.Tunes. The Dot.Tunes application turns your home computer into a streaming media server. You can password protect your files, and purchase a whole slue of experience enhancing plugins for it like multi user accounts, or my favorite the iPhone Plugin, that turns my iPhone 3G into a powerhouse media player with terabytes of music and not a few gigs.
iPhoto Library: Dot.Tunes has a free application for that too — HookUp allows you share your iPhoto Library online.
Want the ultimate in sync for your mac, pc, and mobile device? A service that I just love is SugarSync! ($2.49 per month 10GB) You set your shared folders and It syncs your files in real time across all of your systems.
What an excellent article, Mark. This is exactly what I need.
I've already got Gmail set up for home and work, really all I need to sync is calendars, mail, contacts and to-do lists. Do you have any recommendations for to-do lists? I am using Remember The Milk and Basecamp.
Out of curiosity, what do you use to edit all your stuff? Do you go for Google's web interfaces or use the desktop apps themselves? I can see there being an advantage to using the web interfaces as they will be consistent across all your machines, and with things like Fluid and Prism you can make them almost like desktop apps, but I can see the advantage of using desktop apps if your connection goes down (or just being slow).
Looks like I'll be geeking out with configuring all this tonight ;)
Great Mike! I am glad you found it useful. My To-Do's are all stored in my email program. (mac mail) I tried RTM but felt it was too much work for me as I am to lazy. I would have to research something else as an alternate and get back to you.
Editing can be done from any system as everything is bi-directional. If I edit my calendar online, it updates my computers. Likewise editing on my computer, updates my online system. That it the beauty of being synced. I am not tied to any particular method or computer and use what is convenient for me at the time.
Great list, especially when getting a new computer and having to transfer your things!
I wanted to suggest the service Windows Live FolderShare (https://foldershare.com), it syncs shared folders across all of your systems, is free, and gives you quite a bit of space.
I haven't had any problems with it so far, but it is still in beta, so use at your own risk. :)
Great list, especially when getting a new computer and having to transfer your things!
I wanted to suggest the service Windows Live FolderShare (https://foldershare.com), it syncs shared folders across all of your systems, is free, and gives you quite a bit of space.
I haven't had any problems with it so far, but it is still in beta, so use at your own risk. :)
@Brandon, I especially love this when setting up a new computer, your absolutely right! Sorry it took a few days to respond, but I was waiting to see if the link you provided would work for me so that I could respond... Currently It's giving me an SSL error and Firefox is blocking the site. I'll check back later though. Thanks for the link.