If you are like me you have multiple PCs that you continually switch between. You have machines that some applications only run on, others with big screens for graphics work, laptops for portability, machines for testing, servers, and then a whole slew of virtual machines.
The problem that this plethora of computers presents is that there are always data that you need no matter which computing environment you’re using. What I really want is access to all of my digital stuff that I use on an everyday basis anywhere and on any machine at any time.
To achieve this goal sometimes I resort to USB drives for moving this data around but, more usually when I’m in the office I’ll rely on shared network storage.
Of course there’s always the times when I’m on the road and unless I need to get access to tens of gigabytes of data there are any number of services that will provide shared virtual folders for free.
In this category one of my favorites was, and still is, DropBox, which I discussed in this newsletter just over a year ago. DropBox provides 2GB of shared storage for free while 50GB and 100GB cost just $9.99 and $19.99 per month respectively. Note that DropBox now also offers an iPhone application.
One thing that is tricky to sync are browser bookmarks, which are crucial to how most of us manage our online experience. I just started using a bookmark synchronizer has really impressed me: Xmarks.
Xmarks was originally called Foxmarks as it used to work only with Firefox. This changed with the release in March this year of additional support for Internet Explorer, and Safari (Mac OS) so now you can keep all of your bookmarks synchronized across all of those browsers and platforms.
But wait, there’s more! You can have Xmarks create multiple backups of your bookmarks that you can selectively restore and or edit, you can access your bookmarks online in your Xmarks account (both WAP-based and iPhone optimized versions are provided for mobile users), and you can publicly share some or all of your bookmarks which can be accessed on the Xmarks site or through an RSS feed.
Another feature of Xmarks is a result of the Xmarks server being the intermediary for syncing your: The collective bookmarks of all of the users are analyzed so when you do a Google search Xmarks flags the three most popular sites according to the data. Better still, if you hover your mouse over the flag, Xmarks displays the details of site popularity, reviews, and related topics.
Xmarks is, by far, the best bookmark synchronizer I’ve found and brings me a step or two closer to having all my stuff available on whatever machine I’m using.
