The sweetness of syncing

Image via CrunchBase

There’s not much worse when it comes to computers than losing all of your data and settings, apart from perhaps your laptop or computer catching fire and burning your house down. Losing all of those pictures or documents or records is a nightmare. Having to reinstall all of your applications, music from iTunes (that’s why I like Spotify so much) and remember all of your favourite websites is a pain, to say the least.

It’s a mantra in the world of computing to be constantly ‘backing your data up’ but that can be a pain in the neck too. With Microsoft Windows as an individual the system reminds you once in a while to back up. Unless you are permanently connected to an external hard drive to where you can make copies of all of your precious data items (which can also go wrong too), then remembering to regularly connect your machine to your back up disk is something which many people rarely do.

This is where backing up your data to an online service sounds great. There are lots of services to choose from like DropBox and Carbonite. DropBox is good and backs up your data automatically to the ‘cloud’. But, it only backs up the data in the ‘DropBox’ folder on your machine, which means you have to remember to save your data to that file. Microsoft offers free, online back up to ‘SkyDrive’ but it’s not automatic. Google Docs allows you to save documents to their service and, again, this is not done for you automatically. You have to manually load documents to their service.



So, imagine my relief when I came across ‘SugarSync’. This is an automatic service which backs up any folders you specify (and some by default) and it has a free service. You install the SugarSync application on your machine after signing up and it will begin to back your files up straight away. It’s only drawback is that it does not work on Linux based machines unlike some other services. But, that’s fine if you don’t use Linux.

The online access is very slick too so you can see all of your files very easily. You can also share the files with other people too. So, really, there is now no excuse for losing your data. You don’t have to remember to do it at all.