Synchronization Update

Two years ago, I blogged about synchronization across multiple computers. The landscape of tools has changed quite a bit, and a few winners (and losers) have emerged.

File Synching
Winner: Dropbox
Losers: PowerFolder, Jungle Disk
Last time I reviewed these, PowerFolder seemed better than the alternatives, but a new competitor has joined the scene: Dropbox. Although a few years ago when I first tried it I couldn't even get it installed, now it is mature and is everything you'd want from a file synchronizer: Simple, minimalist, correct, and the PackRat additional feature automatically backs up every version of every file as long as you pay for it, with instant backup and great cues to let you know whether something is backed up or not. There's also a great free trial. It's got a great GUI design, and it just works... PowerFolder and Jungle Disk corrupted my file structure, gave me many error messages, and had a confusing and complicated setup process. There really is a clear winner now: DropBox.


Bookmark Synching
Current Best: XMarks (with weaknesses)
Loser: Firefox Sync
After I heard XMarks was planning to go under, I started to switch to Firefox Sync. I used it for only a few weeks. During my test, it doubled the number of bookmarks I had, duplicating the same ones and putting them in many different, wrong folders. When I tried to reorganize them, the random synch duplication started again. Firefox sync worked only on Firefox, and it caused me at least 10 hours of manual de-duping and sorting of my 2600+ bookmarks. Then, Firefox got bought and announced it would stay in business, and I can now announce I'm sticking with XMarks. XMarks isn't flawless... It can still give you some strange error messages and occasional bookmark corruption. However, it does have backups of just about every synch version from years in the past, so you can quickly restore to an uncorrupted version. Tip: If one computer is corrupted and another one isn't, you can restore on the corrupted computer but "merge" on the uncorrupted computer, thus allowing you to avoid losing any new bookmarks added on the uncorrupted computer. Tricky, but it works.