Like many peo­ple, I use more than one com­puter and I like to have all my files, book­marks and other set­tings syn­chro­nized across my com­put­ers. For­tu­nately, that is get­ting eas­ier as more tools are made avail­able for keep­ing com­put­ers syn­chro­nized. I know some of the read­ers of this blog have been using Xmarks to keep their book­marks synced, and are now look­ing at alter­na­tives tools due to the immi­nent demise of Xmarks. So I thought it might be timely to review how to keep com­put­ers “synced”.

Files:

By far the best ser­vice is Drop­box. All files within the “My Drop­box” direc­tory are backed up online and syn­chro­nized with any other com­puter asso­ci­ated with your account. It is free if you use less than 2Gb of stor­age, and $99 per year for up to 50Gb of stor­age. It is amaz­ingly fast and just works in the back­ground with­out you hav­ing to do any­thing. I have used two other com­peti­tor ser­vices that had received quite good reviews online (Sync­plic­ity and Sug­ar­Sync) but both were MUCH slower than Drop­box and did not always update my files prop­erly. Drop­box works on Win­dows, Mac and Linux. You can also share some files/​directories with other users. Apart from sync­ing, you also have a full online backup if any­thing goes wrong with your com­put­ers. Finally, you can access your files from other com­put­ers (or on your phone) by log­ging in to the drop­box web­site. (There is a nice iPhone app which makes it easy to access your files while travelling.)

Browser set­tings:

Google Chrome syn­chro­nizes all set­tings, exten­sions, themes, pass­words, book­marks, etc. via your Google account. If I install an exten­sion at work, it will be on my home com­puter next time I use the browser. This saves my loads of time. I believe Fire­fox 4.0 will have some/​all of these fea­tures as well.

Book­marks:

I don’t like hav­ing all my book­marks stored in the browser as I have hun­dreds and they are hard to man­age via the browser’s book­marks bar. For­tu­nately there are sev­eral good online (and social) book­mark­ing ser­vices that can be used instead. Some of the most pop­u­lar are Google book­marks, Deli­cious and Diigo. I’ve exper­i­mented with all three and have cho­sen Diigo as the neat­est and eas­i­est to use. There are plugins/​extensions for the main browsers, plus phone apps so you can access your book­marks wher­ever you are. Diigo book­marks can be tagged, searched and shared (although you can turn shar­ing off if you want some pri­vacy!). For those inter­ested, you can view all my book­marks (actu­ally just those that I have not restricted to pri­vate). You can also “fol­low” peo­ple with sim­i­lar inter­ests and dis­cover book­marks that way.

Pass­words:

I pre­fer another level of secu­rity than is pos­si­ble using only the browser to save and sync all book­marks. Again, there are a few avail­able ser­vices. I use Last­Pass which keeps all my pass­words and other infor­ma­tion secure. There are browser exten­sions avail­able to make it easy. A nice fea­ture is that you can have a sep­a­rate and secure pass­word (ran­domly gen­er­ated) for every site, but you only have to remem­ber the one pass­word to enable Last­Pass in your browser.

Related Posts:

• Expand your Drop­box space for free
• In praise of Dropbox
• Back­ing up
• iPhone apps for research
• Use Mende­ley to man­age your references