Synchronize It! In Synch in No Time Flat Efficient, Painless Synching at Your Service Adam Stone
Worst case scenario: You're getting ready for a meeting and you transfer the latest financials from your desktop to your laptop ... or so you think. After breaking for lunch you head to the meeting, where you present numbers that are an hour out of date and, as it turns out, completely wrong.
With data so portable and so readily at hand, it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. In fact, data can change behind your back, making it all the more important to keep all your devices in synch. That's where a tool like Synchronize It! from Grig Software can help. This $29 application lets you easily see what has changed in your folders and allows you to quickly transfer those changes between devices with one mouse click.
While there are a number of other synchronization tools on the market, such as Easy2Synch and FoldersSynchronizerX from Softobe, Synchronize It! offers a creative interface that can help make the synch process more efficient.
Folder synchronization tools typically take one of two approaches. Either they offer multiple settings on multiple pages, or else they offer a limited set of tools on a single page. The former can be cumbersome, while the latter can be thin on features. Synchronize It! tries to straddle the line, packing a range of options onto a single page, options such as the abilities to include or exclude file masks, exclude folders, change copy direction, or delete files.
The synch process is fairly straightforward. A user selects a source and a target — these can be folders and/or subfolders, ZIP files, or other archive files. Then one sets the options, which can range from a simple two-way synch in which each end of the process mirrors the other, to a backup mode that deletes target files not found on the source, or to a third option, a duplicate source mode, that makes the target mirror the source.
A single mouse click initiates a comparison of the source and target. Then the software presents a color-coded screen showing the differences and asking for approval. Here the user can take files or folders off the list if those items don't need to be synchronized. This process can also be augmented with Grig's Compare It! product, which presents a detailed side-by-side comparison that makes it easy to identify differences between two files at a glance.
