Yesterday I was mentioning some of the Synchronization possibilities for Origami owners. Today I decided to test the ones that I have not tested and see how well they work.
SyncToy and Total Commander work basically in the same way, you select two folders and you sync them MANUALLY. And I said that in upper case because that's where the system fails in my opinion; in one simple point: Nobody is going to keep track of when a Synchronization is needed and even if somebody try to keep track at some point the person could end with files updated in different ways in two different folders and probably without any possibility of mixing them.
FolderShare is really the best option but... Nobody is perfect, you need an Internet connection for this system to work! Why Microsoft makes thing sometime so difficult? Why the SyncToy team did not apply the same concept used in FolderShare but in an intranet environment? A program running in background checking and keeping synchronized two network folders, without any human intervention once the folder pair is created. In that way as soon as the UMPC device is connected to your home network the program will notice that and will sync the folder that just became available in your UMPC to it's pair in your Desktop PC.
Of course, we are talking here about file synchronization. Outlook synchronization is a whole different topic.
Great post!
ReplyDeleteI sent you some traffic:
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I also posted about your site in general:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.handtops.com/forum/2010/1/19869/Great_Blog_site.html#19869
Thanks!
ReplyDeleteHi CTitanic,
ReplyDeleteIf you have spent more time with SyncToy, you would have found out that you can actually schedule it to sync regularly using the Windows Scheduled Task.
Here is a command I am using to sync my podcast downloads from my MCE and my laptop:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft\SyncToy\SyncToy.exe" -R"MyPodcasts"
where "MyPodcast" is name of one of my SyncToy folder definitions.
It is not much a worry to sync folders, what I am missing in UMPC up till now is the ability of my media based on the AutoPlaylist feature of Windows Media Player 10. I am hooked on this feature to randomly select certain media type (video or audio), genre, maximum file size, maximum sync size etc. Infact, AutoPlaylist supply my PocketPC with a jukebox of random media, and I am usually pleasantly suprised in what I get while on the road because I have a large library.
It will be nice if MS let us sync to Harddisk via WM10, that will really be great, or better still, if UMPCs becomes MCE Extenders to be able to sync to local.
- McAkins
Well the latest news that I have from UMPCbuzz.com is that Microsoft is thinking about to release the needed software to make a UMPC your MCE Extender. About using that task schedule with SyncToy yes, that's a possibility but I don't think that a better one than Always Sync, trust me. I have lately read about another good one called Second Copy but I have not tested yet.
ReplyDeleteI'm an iTune fan, I do not like WMP at all. For my movies I use AVI and any avi player because I have found that WMP does not play AVI very well too.