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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.

Last night the unexpected happened. My laptop hard drive died. 500GB of hard disk space is a lot, and I was using a few hundred GB of it, but outside of applications, the data was not a whole lot, about 6GB. All of my music is backed up to several local machines, and my photos are on my photo machine, home server and Amazon. The amazing thing about the total hard drive failure was that the only single thing I was thinking about was “what size/kind of hard drive will I replace it with?” I never once thought about loss of data.

That’s quite an amazing change from where we were not to long ago. I have lost so many photos, videos and MP3 files that I would gladly pay to get back over the years because of an admittedly lazy backup strategy (or in some cases no strategy.)

I can remember a hard drive failure resulting in a tangible sense of loss. Now it’s no different to me than a failed video card or a busted printer. Finally, and I hate to use the word, the Cloud and more specifically Dropbox, has solved my data problems and my computer is just a very fancy tool.

So let’s go through the process of rebuilding my computer and I’ll throw in all the places Dropbox made a huge difference in my restoration strategy.

The Data

Of course I want all of my documents, photos, Lightroom presets, fonts, PDFs, etc. Those are super important, just by installing Dropbox all of that was right back where it belonged, perfectly in sync with my PC Desktop, Mac Pros, iMac, Work Laptop, even my iPad and iPhone. If I end up on someone else’s PC I can access all of it from the browser. I always have access to all of my data.

I even store tons of sensitive personal data on Dropbox. I am sure you’ll cringe at believing it, but Dropbox’s service is actually very secure.

The Software

After I had reinstalled OS X, the first thing I did was reinstall the Dropbox client. It had about 6GB of downloading to do before it was finished, but at that point I was ready to start installing real software. Why do I say that? Because I store all of my software serial numbers in Dropbox. I have a folder where I keep the serial numbers for Adobe’s Creative Suite, Lightroom, Final Cut, Office..you name it. During this install I had to reach for X DVDs in total: OS X, iLife, Adobe Creative Suite, Final Cut Express. That’s literally it.

Lightroom, Office… pretty much all of my other apps were download from the net and punch in my serial number.

The Habits

It doesn’t take that long to get used to it. I don’t even think twice about it anymore. Unless it’s a massive video file or a disc image of some sort, I always save it to Dropbox. I have a very Monkish hierarchy where I know exactly where things should go. I have shares with several of my friends and my wife and son. We never email files or IM File transfer them anymore. When Dawn needs something I’ll just say “I stuck it in the family Dropbox.” Not only does she know where that is, she usually gets a tidy system tray notification that it has been added and she can click it and go right to it. If I need to share it with someone else I’ll just throw it in the public folder and get a link right to it.

While we are on that topic of convenience, several times my OCD file maintenance habits have led me to delete a file prematurely. That’s not much of a problem either, within 30 days I can just go back to the Dropbox website and undelete it. If you want to pay a little extra you can get unlimited history for undeleting and file versioning.

The Cost

While we are on the topic, how much does Dropbox cost? For most people it’s free. If you need less than 3+GB, it’s free. I say 3+ because Dropbox is pretty generous at giving you extra space, we are talking 1.5GB of space, for doing your part to help spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, friends, etc.

If you need more, like me, $9.99/month gets you 50GB of space, $19.99/mo gets you 100GB of space. That’s pretty reasonable considering the amount of space and the features you get for the money.

The Dropbox Commercial

So why am I sitting here telling you how awesome Dropbox is? I have been saying it for ages, but mostly because it just made a dead hard drive a minor inconvenience. It gives me the utmost confidence in data redundancy, and lastly, it’s just cool. The service is rock solid, I can’t remember an outage at all. It works on every device you have pretty much. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it makes keeping up with your data everywhere you need it totally painless.

There are other services that provide similar functionality, and I have tried them all. I’ll stick with Dropbox, I love it.

If you are going to try it, sign up with this Dropbox link and I get 500mb of free space, you’ll get a nice 250mb bump for yourself too!

There are some great programs and services for keeping files in sync. Personally I use Dropbox, but I have also used Live Mesh with great success. These services are great for managing a limited amount of files, but what if you need to manage a lot, like my nearly 100GB Lightroom photo collection on my Mac Pro?

I have a 1TB Storage drive and a 1TB backup drive on that machine, but being someone who has lost a lot of photos in my lifetime, I also like to have an off PC backup and an off site backup. How can I accomplish this you ask? Silverkeeper helps me with the first part, Home Server and Cloudberry solve the second part.

I have Silverkeeper, a free Mac based backup utility from LaCie, set up to do two backups daily. The 1st backup copies my library from my storage drive to the backup drive. The second job backs up the hole library from my backup drive to my Home Server’s user folder.

Once the photos are staged there, Cloudberry does the magic of syncing the photos from my home server to Amazon’s S3 service.

I am sure at this point you are thinking, “My God is that overkill.” The sad part is that I have lost so many originals to my favorite photos over the years due to failing disks and simple mismanagement of files, this solution is nearly fool proof.

When Microsoft drops the latest version of Home Server with native OS X backup support, I will probably take the second backup off and do the backup to home server via native means, but for now, this works well.

If you have a Mac, and want to backup files to another location, PC or Mac, this free utility is from a reputable company and definitely worth checking out.

In a conversation with a friend this week, I realized that I have mastered a very dark art. I have figured out how to move around between many computers, using them frequently, while never being without my data and information regardless of the computer, the operating system, the browser and the like.

I am not sure how you work, but if you are in the technology industry like me, you find yourself using several different machines. At work I have a desktop PC that I use running Windows 7 with both Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 as browsers. I also have a company issued laptop that runs Windows 7 and Internet Explorer.

At home it get’s much messier. My main machine runs Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 as the main browser, but I also find my time split with a Macbook Pro laptop with Safari and Firefox, a two Mac Pros both with only Safari, and occasional use of an iMac with Safari as well.

That’s a big stew of machines and several different regular browsers. Now the question is (other than why do I have so many machines) what do I do with them and how do I manage to do that comfortably on any machine? I’ll break this down into a few types of productivity, and then explain how I manage to move through this quagmire with grace and style.

Email

One of the most frustrating things to use on multiple computers and now phones, is email. The most simple of internet transports, email can be a total mess when you start checking it in more than one place. Traditionally, email moves over two protocols, POP3 for sending email, and SMTP for receiving email. If you don’t know what those are, feel free to read the Wikipedia links. The problem with using POP3 for receiving email, is that you pretty much have two options. You can download the message to your computer and remove it from the server, making it impossible for you to retrieve from the next machine, or you can download it while leaving a copy on the server, which means the next machine will download the message regardless of whether you have identified it as junk or not.

This all sounds so messy, but fear not, there is a very lovely solution in sight. Not every email service supports it, but Gmail does. I migrated my personal domain email over to Gmail a few years ago, and enabled IMAP support. IMAP is an alternative protocol to POP3 that instead of downloading messages, maintains a live connection to your mailbox.

The benefit of this solution is that if I delete an email with my email client, it is automatically deleted from the server. If I send an email, a copy of that email is stored in the sent items on the server. If I reorganize my entire email folder system, it is reflected the next time I log in from another machine.

This functionality takes all of the tedium out of managing my email in multiple places. While I am at work, I don’t use an email client, I simply manage my email on the web. When I come home and open up Thunderbird, in a few seconds all of the changes I made to my mailbox are reflected and I am exactly how I left it the last place I was. This even works for managing my email on my iPhone. If I delete a message it’s gone, if I send it, it’s sitting on my desktop in sent items the next time I am home. I am sold.

Files

Another really frustrating point when working between machines is constantly thumbing around files, emailing them, dealing with version hassles and simply being frustrated because you don’t have access to something. I have parsed my files in two manners. All of what I call “productivity files” are stored in the service Dropbox. The Dropbox program is on all of my PCs, Macs and iPhone and the service makes sure that a recent copy of all of my files I need is synced to all of the machines. The files are all stored in the same place in the same file structure.

These files are also available, including 30 days worth of version history, online. This has come in very handy when I deleted something and then realized I needed it, or just wanted to go back to a previous version of something. When I open a document, change it and save it, within seconds the changed version is updated on all of my machines. I never have to make any effort to move or manage the files.

I have replaced the Camera app on my iPhone with the Dropbox app and now every photo I take is instantly available on all of my computers. Another awesome convenience is a public folder that I can copy files to and then provide a link for anyone to download them, I have used this an infinite number of times already to share a file quickly with a friend via IM or email, it’s much more convenient than sending the actual file or trying to transfer it via IM transfer.

While the $10/mo service I pay for (2GB per month is free) gives me plenty of space, some of the music and video files I work with are just too big to conveniently transfer over the internet, for those files I use Windows Home Server. Windows Home Server is where all of my media is saved when I am at home, and conveniently, Microsoft gives you the ability to make your server publicly available so you can log in and download a movie or some songs that you realized you wanted to have somewhere else. Pretty handy feature! There is also the ability to add files to it while you are remote.

The last convenient feature with Windows Home Server is the ability to remote desktop into any computer on my home network via the server as a gateway. If it happens that I have not stored the file in Dropbox, and I am not saving it on the server, I can physically take control of any PC on my network (and Macs via VNC) and get the file I need and move it to a location I can get to. I love thumb drives, but I don’t find myself needing them quite as much anymore.

Bookmarks

There was a long time when I just plain didn’t use bookmarks. I still read MOST of the sites I follow via RSS, but with all of the banking sites, retirement sites, my personal sites, things I just want to look at again later, as well as webmail, Bloglines and work email, bookmarks are just easier. I keep all the ones I really use in a hierarchy in the browser’s bookmark toolbar so I have quick access.

The problem is that I use different browsers on different OSes, so I can’t just sync bookmark files or something. Enter X-Marks. X-marks is a service that works on any browser on any operating system (at least the major ones) that keeps a server copy of all my bookmarks that I can manage. Then when it syncs, it makes sure that everything is how it should be. That way if I bookmark something to look at it later, it’s bookmarked on my PC when I get home.

I can’t tell you how handy it is. I actually keep a bookmark folder called “Random” that I throw this stuff into so I can keep it away from the meticulous organization of my other bookmarks (did I mention I am a bit OCD?)

What Does It All Mean?

What it means is that I always have my stuff. It also means that with a new machine or a necessary reinstall, I can pretty much install X-Marks, Dropbox and Office and I am back in business and can work. It also means that if I find myself on a rogue machine I don’t own, I can get to my stuff if I need to do something. It makes for a very clean workflow for my nomadic computing lifestyle.

I hope this helps those of you that find yourself between machines often. This is also really useful information if you find yourself dual booting (bootcamp for you Mac guys) a lot!

We get so caught up these days in “open source” this and “proprietary” that. Sometimes it’s a good idea to forget the dogma and just talk about what is simply good software. I decided to do this in a top 10 list, and as you will see, it is not tied to either Windows or OSX. This is just a list of software I love: (In no particular order)

10 – Mozilla Thunderbird (Free)

There are tons of email clients out there. I don’t have a single thing bad to say about them really. I use Outlook 2010 at work, I have Mail and Windows Live Mail installed on my Macs and PCs respectively, but for my home use, on both PC and Mac, I use Thunderbird. I host my personal mail via Gmail and Thunderbird works very nice with IMAP mail. I did use Postbox for a while, and really liked it also, but sometimes you just can’t beat free. Thunderbird is free, cross platform, stable, fast and I just like it.

9 – Windows Live Writer (Free)

I am writing this blog using it as we speak. I use it for both personal and professional blogging on a variety of platforms (WordPress, SharePoint, Community Server) and it’s rock solid and easy to use all the way around. Unfortunately for you Mac guys out there, it’s PC only, but it’s so good that I know for a fact I am not the only one who keeps a VMWare or Parallels running on my Macs so I can use it when I need to.

8 – Pidgin IM (Free)

If you communicate with a ton of people, you can’t be tethered to a single protocol. Some people don’t mind tons of Windows and apps running. I guess my OCD tendency for order and control takes hold here. Give me one list, and one chat window, tabbed with all of my conversations, regardless of network. That’s what Pidgin does, it supports MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Facebook, Myspace, the list goes on and on. It’s PC only, I solve this problem on the Mac using Adium.

7 – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ($239)

Ah, the program that knocked Adobe Photoshop out of my rotation. I actually own a legal licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4. The sad reality is I use it about once a month maybe. That might be exaggerating actually. I use Lightroom all the time on my Macs. It’s PC also, but I only bought the Mac version. For going through tons of photos, making adjustments and minor corrections, and quickly publishing them to services like Flickr or Facebook, it’s a photographer’s dream.

6 – Zune (Free)

I am sure you are thinking that if I didn’t have a Zune, I wouldn’t use this software. I’d slap you in the face for saying that sir! It’s all about the ZunePass. I get all you can eat music downloads for $15 a month. I can download 10 songs a month free and clear as MP3s, and run the software on 3 PCs, as well as have my music on 3 devices. To be clear, I DO have 3 Devices, a Zune HD, a 120GB Zune and an 80GB Zune, but I would have it either way. It’s beautiful, it helps you discover tons of music you never knew existed, and it’s Microsoft man!

5 – Tweetdeck (Free)

This time a year or so ago I was blogging about how I just don’t get Twitter. Now I do, and boy do I. I don’t think I could manage it the way I do without Tweetdeck. I use it at work to keep up with the world’s conversations about our products, and I use it at home to keep up with my geek pundits and tech news as a whole. It’s free, runs on Adobe Air so it runs on any platform.

4 – Dropbox (Free)

I know I have blogged it recently, but I freaking LOVE Dropbox. Probably my most favorite software right now by far. I use it all the time. I use it on my iPhone, I use it on all my PCs and Macs, I move files back and forth with it all the time. I use it with my wife and friends to share files. It’s just an amazing way to keep access to all of your files, as well as share files with others. It’s just there, it works like you would expect, and it’s fast as hell.

3 – Foxit Reader (Free)

Let me make this clear. I HATE Adobe Acrobat Reader. Not only is it the most bloated software in the world, it also tries to sneakily install crap you don’t want. Foxit Reader is a very lightweight and easy to use Acrobat Document (PDF) reader. It’s free and works like a charm.

2 – X Marks (Free)

I use Internet Explorer 8 all the time. I use Firefox a fair bit. I use Safari from time to time. How do I make sure I never have to worry about finding bookmarks? X Marks keeps them perfectly in sync on any browser on any platform. It’s install and forget. You can also manage your bookmarks online which is very handy.

1 – Handbrake (Free)

Those of you that know me, know me to be pretty damned complaint when it comes to legal software, legal music, legal video. I buy them all. One thing that grinds my gears (thanks Peter) is that when I want to watch video I have legally purchased on the go, I need to repurchase it?!? No thanks. I use handbrake on the Mac and the PC to rip my DVDs into files I can carry along with me.

Conclusion…

Wow, a top 10 list of software I love, and only one of them isn’t free. Go figure. I have of course many paid programs I use and love (Final Cut, Logic Studio, Pro Tools, Photoshop, Office, Windows) but I wanted a list of stuff that is very useful to a broad set of people. Looks like the cost of general productivity software is getting low!!! If have provided links so you can download (or buy in the case of Lightroom) I hope you enjoy the recommendations.