A good syncing feeling

By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 01/28/02

Well, this week we were going to take a look at Suitcase Network from Extensis, but we discovered late last week that although the server component runs under Windows NT, the management console only runs on Macintosh. As we don't have a Macintosh here, we are stymied until we can beg, borrow or steal.

So this week we'll look at a product that has made our lives easier - including the problem of distributing sets of fonts to multiple PCs. That product is PCsync from LapLink (www.laplink.com).

PCsync is a utility for moving files around TCP/IP nets and Microsoft LANs. But wait! There's more! Yes folks, not only does it uni- or bidirectionally sync files, but it can migrate the files of some 45 popular applications and their settings from one PC to another.

Before you get too excited about the application migration, realize that it is just the working files and application configuration that are moved - moving complete applications is fiendishly difficult.

We recently tried a product called Alohabob PC Relocator (www.alohabob.com) that attempts to do a complete relocation job, and it was a total failure - the program seemed to choke on the volume of data, and as we'd left it running for several hours we were not inclined to start over. If anyone has used this program, perhaps you could tell us about your experience.

Anyway, PCsync is pretty cool and very easy to install. If the Microsoft Java VM is not already installed, PCsync's installer will install and reboot to complete the process. If you already have the VM, installation is painless, as rebooting isn't needed.

You configure PCsync by telling it what you want to share (assuming that you do) and what privileges you want users to have (read-only or read-write); assign a username and passwords (one for each privilege level); whether only Secure Sockets Layer connections will be allowed; and select whether non-PCsync users should have access (we'll come back to this in a second). PCsync also can send e-mail to alert people that you have content to share.

You can scan for other visible PCsync installations on your network or connect by name (DNS or Microsoft networking) or by IP address. Once connected, you can select files and directories on your side or on the remote machine and transfer them unconditionally. Or you can update either or both ends, optionally excluding files that aren't on both sides and optionally including subdirectories. You can also apply a mask to further constrain which files are affected.

A very useful feature, called SmartXchange, gives you the ability to save transfer jobs so they can be run again. You can also selectively exclude files by allowing a preview of the transfer job, and those excluded files can be stored as part of the SmartXchange job. The only things we think are missing from this feature are a timer so that transfers can be scheduled and command-line parameters so that PCsync can be launched and automatically execute a SmartXchange job.

But there's another really, really useful feature: A built-in Web server they call Surf Up (ugh!). By pointing your browser to the DNS name or IP address of an appropriately configured machine running PCsync, requesting Port 8444 and the directory PCsync you can browse, upload and download the shared contents of the remote machine. LapLink also provides a Lightweight Diectory Access Protocol service so that you can find machines easily running PCsync over the Internet.

PCsync comes with a serial cable, or you can use a Universal Serial Bus connection for direct local connections. LapLink wisely has included the ability to download PCsync to another machine over the serial connection, but unwisely not over a network connection, which would be jolly useful. Be that as it may . . .

LapLink also includes a variant of PCsync called MusicMover that can find, play, copy and move MP3 files to and from libraries you set up. And PCsync is smart enough to be able to read the MP3 tags and sort by any of the fields available. It even can analyze the files to display pie graphs showing how your library is divided by genre or artist.

At $80, PCsync is a nice piece of work and we award it nine gearteeth out of 10.

Transfer your comments (and Macs) to gearhead@gibbs.com.