A pleasant experience with Windows Live Sync, and Office Live

I'm getting ready for a long trip where I may have only intermittent internet access, so I wanted to find a way of working offline with my laptop while on the road that would let me sync everything again with my office when I did have access.  I wanted to be able to keep a fairly large working directory in sync, about 80gb or so.  One possibility would have been DropBox, but that amount of space would cost money, so I kept looking at other possibilities for automatic synchronization between laptop and office.

In the past I never had much luck with synchronizing across computers.  I had experimented with SyncToy for shared folders on computers connected by Hamachi LogMeIn VPN, but had given up on SyncToy because while in many ways it was a neat and handy program, it did have glitches.  I had tried some other freeware or shareware sync programs, and it seemed like every one of them had some kind of limitation or another, like they had problems with syncing across time zones, or couldn't handle Unicode characters in filenames, or were just slow or erratic.

I came across some positive assessments of WindowsLive Sync, so I decided to give it a try.  I was hesitant because my experience with free Microsoft applications was that they always seemed about 95% of the way there, and never quit did everything I needed, or weren't documented very well.  SyncToy, for example, was really neat but I had to give up because of frustration with some glitches.  But the reviews of WindowsLive Sync were pretty positive so I installed it on my office and on my laptop.  Setting up a folder pair on the two machines was pretty straightforward, and one nice feature was that as long as Sync was installed on both machines, it was easy to choose the folder on the other machine remotely, via a web based interface that also allowed creation of new folders.  I paired the documents directory on my office with a newly created empty directory on an encrypted external hard drive connected to my laptop, and it began syncing immediately.  It processed about 18,000 files very smoothly, filling up the newly created folder.  I was pleased to see over the next few days that changes to a file on one machine were immediately reflected in its copy on the other machine, even large datasets of several hundred megabytes, but the sync didn't interfere at all with the data processing that I was doing.

I liked it so much that I decided to sync my music collection between office, home, and encrypted external HD on laptop, and somewhat to my surprise that worked fairly smoothly, even though thousands of files were involved.  It worked so smoothly that I have decided to rely on Sync to keep my music collection consistent across different machines.  Previously I kept my music collection on a home machine that I used as a server, and accessed from the office or elsewhere via folder sharing over LogMeIn Hamachi, which required some tweaking of the MediaMonkey .ini file to ensure all the machines use the same database file on the home machine.  Now I will give up on a having the music and database on a single machine and instead have synced copies of the music on all three machines, with a separate database on each.   Changed files, including with updated ratings, tags, etc., propagate instantly to the other machines.  I just have to set MediaMonkey to monitor the synced folders and I should be golden.

One limitation to WindowsLive Sync is that each folder pair can only have 20,000 files.  I had more files in the folder trees I wanted to sync.  There was a pretty easy workaround: I just split my my music collection into two root folders and set up each of them separately to sync.

While I am at it, I will mention another positive experience I have been having with another Microsoft product, Office Live.  I have been experimenting with it and so far it seems to work.  The advantage over Google Docs, it seems to me, is that you get full formatting.  The biggest weakness of Google Docs, it seems to me, is the lack of control over formatting.  Office Live seems to offer the hope of combing complete formatting with shared access.  I especially the Office plugin that allows for editing of shared documents directly from Office.