Kerkia

Background

The traditional way for synchronizing folders between computers or even computers and/or phones is to use a synchronization tool such as those recommended on Kerkia. A new approach to synchronizing data between computers or simply doing backup of data is to use web services that place your data onto centralized servers, where you can access that data from any of your computers and in a more or less transparent manner.

Recommendation

For this purpose of syncing files between computers, we recommend using dropbox. This tool creates a special My Dropbox folder in your My Documents folder, which works like any other folder in your computer, expect that all of its content is synchronized with the cloud. You can get up to 2Gb of space with a free account. Its advantages over other similar solutions are the speed of the synchronization, the support for file versioning, which is a big plus for many purposes, and the support for mobile apps as well e.g. an iPhone app.

A strong alternative is Microsoft’s Live Mesh. This service supports 5Gb of data and can synchronize any folder from your computer. It also allows you settings up special rights on those folders for a finer control of the file synchronization between machines, and has a nice extra feature that allows taking control of one of your other machines if running, kind of a remote desktop connection over from within the browser. It lacks support for versioning and the support for mobile apps is pending, but the tool is very easy to use and set up.

Both are very easy to use and reliable from our experience.

Web links

Dropbox

Web site: www.getdropbox.com

Live Mesh

Web site: www.mesh.com