Sync’d
We all have so much data these days, including our schedules, contact lists, emails, photo’s, music, videos and documents – what when we create a realiance on this information and data, it needs to be managed. By managed, I refer to backing up and creating a system in which our data remains uniform and easy to follow.
In the life of a computer tech, I see very often, and try to work out data structures, or the way people save / file things on their computer, and it just beyond me how people come up with naming conventions and saving setups.
Seeing some terrible examples of people saving things here there and everywhere, I try have a uniform system that keeps everything together- this makes life easy when it comes to Backup / Restore time, or just day to day surfing and trying to locate files etc.
Backup is the biggest concern of mine, and should but isn’t a worry to most people. What is your contingency plan, if you were to loose your main computer that you have everything saved on? Or your server where it’s stored? Even to the extent, what would you do if your building burnt down, and your computer, along with it’s backup drive was destroyed? For some people it MAY not be so important, this would just mean their collection of emails with funny cat pictures would be lost (and who really cares about that) but for people who do their business online it is a critical resource.
So far we’ve established, a) We have a lot of data, b) we need to sort it neatly and c) it needs to be backed up.
Now these three points aren’t too complex, if you were to buy an Apple computer, save your files where it recommended, and plug in any external hard drive, and run it’s built in backup manager, “Time Machine” you’d have everything pretty much covered.
If only I was running something THAT simple.
Lets bump up the intensity and say our computers we regularly used were, an iMac at home, a Macbook Pro here and there, a PC at work and an iPhone everywhere else.
Over the last year or so I’ve been constantly tweaking things, and here is what I have for each problem.
Shared Files
MobileMe has iDisk included in it’s package, which allows you to sign in to your MobileMe account on your mac and it will automatically sync your iDisk files to your mac and it will 2-way sync – so everything keeps updated. This takes care of the iMac and Macbook Pro.
The iPhone has an iDisk App – so now I can fairly quickly browse through my folders and files and even open most file types, word docs, pdfs, images etc.
Getting my shared files / iDisk to work on a PC was a little harder, when you map a network drive to the iDisk service, it becomes very laggy as you’re accessing a live server over the internet – what I got to work well was, setting up a directory in My Docs called “Synced Docs” and running Sync Toy (A Free Microsoft App) that can do a 2-way sync with my mapped iDisk drive and the local file directory in the background so performance isn’t affected.
By using the “Cloud” or Online shared files, my documents are automatically distributed to my Office PC, my Home iMac and my Laptop on the run, along with being saved / backed up on Apple’s server. This type of system is good for smaller files, ie, Documents, PDF’s and so forth. It is NOT good for saving your iPhoto or iTunes collection onto as it will just jam everything up.
Shared Contacts
When you buy a new mobile phone and you lost your old one, there is that task of “Oh Hey, I lost my phone, can you send my your numbers” as you’ve lost all your contacts. And the same applies to email as well.
My solution to syncing contact out of Outlook was via the MobileMe system, as they have a nice task bar application that does nothing but sync’s contacts and calendars (I’ll talk about Calendars shortly) and so my contacts are now sync’d off my PC to “the Cloud” and back down to my other Macs and iPhone.
When I bought my last 2 iPhones, all I had to do was sign-in to MobileMe and within 5 mins, over 700 contacts where pulled down onto the phone.
Now when I create a new contact on the run, with my iPhone, the new contact will appear on my other computers.
Shared Calendars
This has been the most annoying element of my sync’ing trials over the last couple of years. I started using MobileMe to do this, and it has been nothing but trouble.
I think the biggest problem has been, that my Calendars where all originally Office ones, and Office names it’s calendars differently to iCal on the mac, and over the last 1.5 years, I’ve completely lost my calendar about 3 times.
What I now use, is Google / Gmail to sync my Calendars as Google have developed a small app that sync’s calendars nicely. I hope a Contact one comes too.
Gmail also allows you to then sync with push to your iPhone any new Calendar updates and vise versa.
