Last word on Syncing...for now (Yeah...sure...)

I may eventually get around to completing my re-reviews in "Syncing devices: June 2013 edition", but it may take awhile, a loooong while. I'm pleased if others find my experiences useful. However, I tend to focus on my specific needs rather than on things for their own sake, so information may not be as detailed as some would like.

I think (I've said this before!) I'm where I need to be at the moment and my next project (tackling Windows 8!) awaits. So, here's where I'm stopping for a spell.

It's hard to be critical of Dropbox. Dropbox is the granddaddy of all of the synchronization/backup services and it does it all well. But, after a colleague's activities resulted in my computer being audited, I decided I needed a second service to use for business so that I could restrict my use of Dropbox to my personal needs. And so the journey began.

Most services create a special folder on one's computer (Dropbox creates Dropbox, Syncbox creates SyncFolder, and so on). File and folders to be synchronized or backed up are moved to that special folder. The more I investigated and used these services, the more it bothered me. I hate moving things around. If I could specify individual folders to be synced, I'd need only one service. I could separate work and personal files by backing up different folders on different computers. Many services are promising this feature, but there aren't many that have it, yet. I know of two worth mentioning.

After a rough start up that had me demanding (and receiving!) a refund for their Pro service, LogMeIn's Cubby has become a viable option.

Pluses worth mentioning

• Backup on LMI's servers, up to the amount of space one purchases (5 GB free, %50/100GB).
• Unlimited Direct Sync that does not get backed up. Just the thing for large music libraries. However, if there is no backup, then erasing a file from one computer erases it from all others, as well.

Minus worth mentioning: I'm not sure how much of a minus this is, but Cubby almost always seems to be doing something in the background that involves 3 to 6% on my CPU's processing power. I'm not sure what impact this is having.

Then there's BitTorrent's BTSync. It's free. It's much like Cubby's Direct Sync. The only downside I can see at the moment is that it doesn't provide for cloud storage.

So...

• I continue to use Dropbox for personal files, largely out of habit, but also because I like the feature that automatically uploads photos from my Smartphone to my Dropbox.
• I continue to use Cubby for two work-related folders, but am having second thoughts.
• I'm using BTSync to sync my music library between my desktop and laptops. I'm thinking of replacing Cubby with BTSync as I become more comfortable with BTSync.
• Since BTSyc does not provide for cloud storage, I purchased a large external drive and configured my desktop computer to back itself up regularly. That way, if something bad happens, the worst it can be is that I lose files that have not yet been backed up.

I need to say something about backups. I will in another post.

OMG!!! DO NOT USE Syncbox TO SYNCHRONIZE FILES!!!

I'd been using Syncbox to synchronize my mp3 files between my desktop and laptop. As part of a re-review of synchronization services, I've been double-checking them all only to find that Syncbox changes the time stamp on EVERY FILE from date last modified to the date copied! I don't kow how I missed this before. Likely because I seeded everything before running Syncbox. In any case Syncbox is being removed from my computers as I type this!

PC makers do sooooo not get it!

Today's Wall Street Journal is reporting PC Makers Fight Back Against Mobile Devices.

How will they do this? Why, with "much less expensive laptop computers that have touch screens for tablet-style operation", of course. Well, forget it. Time to sell short.

It's not about hardware. It's about software. Specifically, it's about software pricing. Long gone are the days of one user, one device. Multiple devices in the form of phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops (home and office versions for some) are becoming more often the rule. I have multiple laptops, notebooks, and desktops that are in active use. If I am lucky, a(n expensive!) piece of PC software will let me install it on any computer over which I have exclusive control. I expect this to become the exception as companies monitor installation and use over the Web. I have many programs that monitor installations, and one that, if I make the mistake of leaving it running on any one machine, refuses to run on any other machine. Thank heavens for remote access services so that I can shut it down when it is running on a computer I am not actually using at the time.

Let's contrast this with Android. All of my devices are known by the accounts they are signed registered with. The Google Play Store (nee Market) knows my devices by Gmail account. Amazon's app store knows me by my Amazon account. I have four tablets and three smartphones. When I buy an Android program (most of them costing less than the sales tax on a comparable PC program!) I can install it on any Android device I own. Just knowing I can do that is worth a great deal to me. Getting a new device? No worries. Just enter my Gmail and Amazon accounts and everything is available. Try doing that with a PC.

So, PC makers, you may get me to buy a Windows 8 device if I need it for something I can't do with my other hardware, but give up Android? Uhm...no. This is "fighting back"? Well, I suppose if you're trying to break the other guy's fist with your chin...

Syncing devices: June 2013 edition

As long as this notice appears, this is a work in progress. I will be reevaluating many services that keep PCs synchronized. I will be reporting on each service as I consider it, rather than wait 'till the end to report on all of them at once.

When necessity dictated a few months ago that I find a method of synchronizing my PCs to work along side of the venerable Dropbox, I found, literally, a half dozen new services just entering the market. I reviewed them as best I could and came up with a(n interim?) solution that proved serviceable. Things were evolving so rapidly then as the services shook their bugs out that I ended up relying on one product that I originally found entirely unacceptable! Since two months has elapsed since those investigations, the time seems ripe to have another look.

Everyone will have his/her own criteria for choosing a particular service. These are the ones that turned out to be important for me. I list them because these are the lenses through which I'm making my evaluations. As they say on the Internet, YMMV.

• Are files kept synced, without noticeable lag time for small updates?
• Are the time stamps right? Many services were stamping files with the date they were synced rather than the date they were last modified. (Imagine twenty years worth of memos with the same time stamp!)
• Can synced directories reside anywhere on a drive or must they be subfolders in a folder specific to the syncing service?
• When a folder already exists on multiple machines, will the service recognize this, or will it insist on copying everything over from what it identifies as a "master" version? This is not an issue for a few gigabytes of files but can loom large when music libraries of tens of thousands of files and hundreds of gigabytes are involve.

So, here we go...

• Jottacloud: No change. I copied a multi-level directory with 4,000+ small files (mostly html). I then installed Jottacloud on another machine and checked to see if any of the downloaded files were tagged with the time they were copied rather than the time they were last modified. Just 1, darn it! An executable.

  It struck me that I should run the same directory through all of the services.

• Dropbox: No problems.
• Cubby: No problems.
• Syncbox: OMG!!! Syncbox is changing the time stamp on EVERY FILE! I don't kow how I missed this before. Syncbox is being removed from my computers as I type this!

Syncing update

Enough has transpired that an update seems called for.

Dropbox works as it's always worked. The reason I am investigating other options is that I need to sync work computers and personal computers separately and together in a way that truly personal information does not appear on work computers. I'd been using Dropbox on my personal computers, so I need something else for my work computers.

Neither Copy nor AeroFS was syncing reliably. I found myself waiting for an hour for Copy to propagate a few small files. AeroFS, given all night to do something similar, still hadn't done it by morning. Two computers had different contents in their AeroFs file. AeroFS was showing that no file transfers were taking place.

I'm currently using

• Dropbox (personal),
• Cubby (work + personal), and
• Syncbox (music files).

What I don't use, and why:

• Copy, did not sync reliably.
• AeroFS, did not sync reliably.
• Google Drive, had trouble with certain file types.
• (Microsoft's) Sky Drive, does not work with Windows XP.
• Box Sync, changes file modification dates to the time it transfers a file.
• Mozy does not let you delete folders from its website. Files have to be deleted one at a time. I found this out the hard way when I went to clean out my account so that I could start fresh,
• SugarSync. When I tried syncing two folders with the same content, it copied the files from one computer to the other, modifying the file name to indicate a conflict. I ended up with two copies of each file except that one had a "conflict" designation in its name.

On the horizon

• Jottacloud is to introduce its syncing feature this week.
• Spider Oak deserves further comment and investigation because of its strong stance on privacy.

If I stay with it, Syncbox will deserved a few paragraphs of its own.

More to come, later this week or early next week. If not the final chapter, then at least the season finale.

A pox on (almost) all their houses--updated! (The houses that provide software for syncing computers.)

Once I was a happy Dropbox user...and then HE came into my life! (Oh, wait, that's the setup for "Niagra Falls".)

Once I was a happy Dropbox user. Then, the University decided it wanted to image my hard drive. No problem. Go for it! It's your computer, after all. Except...uhm...NOT MY DROPBOX. It's got a lot of personal information.

It turned out that the University wanted only specific parts of my hard drive, so Dropbox was saved this time. But, what about next time? I like using Dropbox to keep my personal files synchronized, so I went looking for another service to deal with work files. And I checked them alllllllll.

I started seeing problems, but many site were still in their beta stage and stuff happens. No site is perfect. Some of this is to be expected. However, every site has major shortcomings to the point where I'm disgusted with nearly all of them!

• Dropbox works. I've occasionally had trouble working on Powerpoint files while they sit in Dropbox. I now move them out of dropbox to work on them and move them back when I'm done.
• Cubby works but has the annoying habit of using a small portion of the CPU almost constantly. I haven't figured out what it's doing.
• SugarSync: When two computers were seeded with the same folder, SugarSync failed to recognize that the files were identical. In trying to reconcile them, SugarSync created a host of files on one computer with file names that included "copy conflicted with [the name of the other computer]. AVOID
• Google Drive chokes on some file types.
• Skydrive. Will not work under Windows XP.
• Jottacloud. Sync feature have not yet been introduced.
• Copy does not sync reliably for me. Some changes sit on the computer where they were made without propagating to other computers. DO NOT USE! Box Sync changes file modification dates to the time the file was transferred to a particular computer. DO NOT USE!
• AeroFS was to be my hope for syncing 120+ GB of music files between my desktop and laptop computers. After a lot of effort, I've finally abandoned it. It wasn't syncing!
• Syncbox works! It lets you designate one of your computers as a server, giving you your own personal Dropbox service. I'm now looking to see how much of a toll it takes on system performance.
• Box Sync. AVOID, AVOID, AVOID! (Did I say, "AVOID?") Box Sync changes file time stamps when it moves a file to a different computer. In the picture at the top of this post, you can see what happened when I transferred a directory of files from my home computer to my office computer. On the right, Cubby (or most any other sync program). On the left, Box Sync? Notice the difference? Check the time stamps.

  I suppose that to be fair I should mention that Cubby and Copy had the same problem until I pointed it out to them. They both corrected the problem. I have no doubt that eventually Box Sync will fix it, too, but, until then AVOID, AVOID, AVOID! (Did I say, "AVOID?")

For more details, see my earlier posts.

Copy.com handles multiple folders, but is it a band saw with no hand guard?

This post will be TMI for most readers who stumble across it, but it's important for anyone who is investigating the many sites that synchronize computers automatically.

[This post may be moot. I'm finding Copy is not syncing reliably. I've edited and added files on one computer that have taken ages to show up elsewhere, if at all. So, as of the moment (11:55pm, 2013-03-24), Copy is on my DO NOT USE list. This is one of those problems that I may not go back to check on if I find other services that work as I expect and fill my needs.]

DISCLAIMER: I have done my best to insure the accuracy of these instructions. However, I cannot guarantee that they will behave as described. Even if they behave as described, it is no guarantee that they will continue to behave this way in the future. I am not an employee of Barracuda Networks. I have no special knowledge of Copy beyond what I have taught myself by using it. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT MIGHT RESULT FROM FOLLOWING THESE INSTRUCTIONS, EVEN IF THEY ARE FOLLOWED TO THE LETTER. In other words, trust no one and verify everything. I urge (warn!) you to try these instructions out on small unimportant folders to determine whether they produce the expected result. The existence of this disclaimer underscores why great care must be exercised in using links.

You may know that synchronization services are of two types: single folder and multiple folder. Single folder services create a special folder on one's hard drive. Everything to be synchronized, both files and folders, are moved into this special folder. Multiple folder services allow users to synchronize folders anywhere on their hard drives.

Copy appears to be a single folder service on the surface, but makes it very easy to synchronize multiple folders by creating shortcuts to the folders and moving the shortcuts into the special Copy folder established by Copy. However, like using a band saw without a hand guard, disaster can strike if one is not very careful. Things must be done in just the right order.

Here is the underlying principle: When folders are linked, their contents are NOT merged. Rather, the contents of the folder linked second replace the contents of the folder linked first! This is not an issue if both folders have the same contents. However

• if a populated folder is linked to an empty folder, both folders will be populated, but
• if an empty folder is linked to a populated folder BOTH FOLDERS WILL BE EMPTY!

To link folders outside of Copy,

• On each computer create a shortcut to the folder you wish to link. The folders need not have the same name nor be in the same location. Once the shortcuts are created, change one or both of the shortcut names as you choose so that they are the same. Let's suppose I have a folder named Laptop on my laptop and Desktop on my desktop. I create shortcuts to the folders on their respective computers and change both names to Everywhere.
• While both computers are logged into Copy, move the shortcut to the folder whose contents are unimportant to that machine's Copy folder. If I want the contents of my desktop's files to be synchronized, the Everywhere shortcut on my laptop is moved to my laptop's Copy folder.
• Go to the other computer. QUIT COPY! Go to the Copy folder and delete the link that Copy moved from the other machine. It looks like a link but is really a folder that is a copy of the folder on the other machine that the shortcut points to. In my case, I would have QUIT COPY on my desktop and deleted the link to Everywhere from the laptop placed in the desktop's Copy folder.
• Move the link to the folder whose contents you wish to preserve to the Copy folder on the second machine. I would move the Everywhere link I created on my desktop to my desktop's Copy folder.
• Restart Copy on the second machine. The contents of the folder on the second computer will be moved to the first, if they are not already there. I would restart Copy on my desktop. Whatever is in the folder that everywhere points to on my desktop will now appear in the folder that Everywhere points to on my laptop's folder.
• From now on, changes on either computer will be replicated on the other.

FWIW, I use Copy and have used the shortcut facility in the past, but I'm not doing so at the moment. This may make me go back to using it again.