Finally In-Sync

Part of the what I hope to do in this space is to show how I found the technology to make my life easier.  I know that perhaps I am not the most tech-savvy person in the world, but still I get frustrated at how difficult it can be to find what should be simple information.  Here was my task, which seemed simple enough: I have a computer at home, one at the office, and a netbook.  My computer at home was running Windows Vista, of all things!  My netbook and the office computer were both running Windows XP.  I wanted a way to keep all my document files in sync on all computers, and to do this without having to remember to do anything.  That is, I wanted it to happen in the background and I knew I could not rely on my memory to keep things up to date.  The first thing I did was to upgrade both my Vista machine and my netbook to Windows 7.  Yes, my netbook is running Windows 7 and is happy doing it!  Along with my update to Windows 7, I downloaded Windows Live Essentials.  This allows one to Sync computers in just the way I wanted, while also keeping copies "in the cloud" that can accessed from any computer that as internet access.  However, the new version only allows syncing between computers running Windows 7.  I still have my office computer, which runs XP (until our IT people decide to switch to Windows 7), and this computer cannot, therefore, sync with the other two.  The solution to this problem came from an article on Lifehacker.com.  I downloaded Syncplicity and followed the instructions carefully.  Syncplicity is free and also offers 2GB of storage with the free version, 50GB with the paid version.  I had already decided only to use this option for documents, so the 2GB limit is fine with me.  Here, then, is my current setup: my home computer and netbook, both running Windows 7, sync through Windows Live Essentials, while my home computer and office computer (running Windows XP) sync through Syncplicity.  The result? Any time I open my documents folder on any of these computers, I am sure that I have the latest version that I had worked on on any of my computers.  Plus, I have the additional benefit of having access through the web to any of my files from any computer.  This is exactly what I wanted, namely a way of keeping all my computers in sync without me having ever to do anything manually!

I will add that there are also ways to do this through Google Docs.  Syncplicity also has the ability to sync with Google Docs, and there are plug-ins available for OpenOffice (my word processor of choice) that allow you to work directly with Google Docs.  However, I have found that the formatting of a document is not maintained as the file goes through Google Docs.  The solution outlined above, however, keeps the formatting identical accross all instances of the file.

Certainly one can find this information on the web, but I put it here because it took me several hours and several failed attempts to come to this solution.  Hopefully, I can help save someone else a great deal of time!