Earlier this week I asked my friends, readers and Twitter followers “How many desktop or laptop computers do you use in a normal day?” A simple question that you might expect would have an answer of 1 or 2 for most people. Surprisingly the average answer was 3, and there were many in the 4-5 range, with mine and several others ballooning up to 8! In this case, we weren’t counting servers, just desktops, laptops, netbooks and net bookish devices like the iPad.
While I had thought I was one of the lone geeks with a ridiculous amount of PCs I touched daily, it turns out it’s not as uncommon as you might think.
Of course my results are skewed over “Normal People” because I asked via mediums that lend themselves to tech savvy users, but we can only assume it’s some sort of leading indicator of what the future might bring.
So what does this have to do with anything you might ask? In this world of multiple computers, multiple operating systems is beginning to be as common as multiple computers. We’ll conveniently skip over Linux for this article, as it’s not really making much of a blip on usage scale and concentrate on Mac and PC.
Living In Two Worlds
It used to be very difficult. I can remember a time when Photoshop 3.0 for Mac wouldn’t read Photoshop 3.0 for PC files. I can remember a time when you had to have some arcane utility just to get a Mac to read a PC formatted disc and vice versa. Back in the day living between multiple platforms was a headache to put it very mildly.
These days my computer ecosystem looks like the diagram below. 3 PCs, 4 Macs and an iPad. That’s a lot of devices, but something occurred to me the other day, and inspired this blog. With the exception of a few specialized applications (Logic Studio or Final Cut for example) it really makes no difference which machine I use. Any time I sit down at a desk or pick up a laptop, when I start working, all my files are exactly where I left them, all of my IM accounts are ready to go, my email is not only set up but perfectly in sync and all of the applications I need to use regularly are available in some form or another on the device I am using at the time.
That’s a hell of a lot of progress in 10 years. These days whether you use a Mac or a PC boils down to a preference.
How Did I Get There?
I don’t want to disillusion you and let you think that it worked this way out of the box. It took some trial and error and patience to figure out what to use and when. Hopefully, if you find yourself living between more than one computer regularly, this article will give you the tools to do it seamlessly.
Where Do My Files Belong
Mac and PC both use the concept of something like a “home folder.” On the Mac it’s your user/profile folder, on the PC, it’s your My Documents folder. I have mentioned it many times before, but step one of keeping everything perfectly in place, in sync, and organized to any Monk’ish degree you prefer, is Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service (up to 2GB, 50GB for $9.99/mo.) that does two things important things. First, it keeps your files available online, so anything you save into your Dropbox folder, is automatically saved to a server on the internet for you to access from anywhere. The second, and most important thing for our scenario, is that it copies that file to the same location on any PC you have added to your Dropbox network. In my case there are 7 computers that run the Dropbox Client, and they collectively sync about 6GB of files. I use it to store anything I am currently working on or might need access to remotely. This includes serial numbers for all the software I own, receipts, documents, some images, etc.
In the case of my work files, I don’t want to share them with my personal files, so my two work machines also have Windows Live Sync installed, and they synchronize my work files in much the same way. No matter which machine I use, the latest stuff is always there, awesome!
Sign up for Dropbox with the following link to get 250MB of extra space free.
Managing the Email Mess
I think we have all done this at some point. You got access to email, you set up your email client with the default settings, and started getting mail. You, deleted a mail you didn’t want, only to move to the second machine and have it downloaded again.
Perhaps you sent your friend a message and needed to check something later, but it was only in the Sent Items folder of the machine you sent it from.
Maybe you actually took the time to create folders and organize all of your mail only to have to do it all over again when you got home.
Perhaps you got really slick with Outlook and did it all with a PST file and then deleted all of your mail and re-imported it when you got to the other machine.
However you did it, you have dealt with managing email in multiple places and it sucks. Luckily there is a much better way. Many services now support a mail protocol called IMAP. In Gmail for example, by simply changing a setting to enable IMAP, and setting up your email clients to access your email this way, all of the problems I mentioned above magically disappear. Your mail is all centrally managed on the server. Sure your local machine can cache it so you don’t have to wait for it to download every time, but any change you make anywhere is automatically reflected anywhere else.
That means that you can delete, send, organize and forward to your heart’s content and you’ll never be stuck trying to figure out what you did. It’s beautiful.
Marking Your Books
I am sure you have been here too. You are at work, someone sends you a link, you want to check it out more when you get home. I bet right now you open up your email client and email yourself the link, right? I used to. Now I use X-Marks. X-Marks supports Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome. Once you create an account and set it up on all of your machines, your bookmarks are always synced.
When I come into this problem, I bookmark the site, and when I get home it’s sitting in my bookmarks right where I left it. I don’t think I could live without it. When you are as OCD as I am, your bookmark structure is as important to you as the bookmarks themselves.
What else?
There are many other tools that can accomplish these types of tasks, these are ones I use and trust. There are also more advanced syncing techniques for specific applications and working with the same files between different applications that I will cover in a future article. For now, take these tips and streamline your life between computers.
