My mother and father have two computers: a workstation with Windows XP and a laptop with Windows Vista. Yesterday I found a program that made it very easy to keep them both synchronized, i.e. to have all documents and pictures available on both computers. The program, made by Microsoft, is SyncToy v2.0.
I don’t normally write about Windows here, but this program was so good I figured I’d let you know about it. I have it set up to synchronize all files on the desktop and in My Pictures. Both computers share their desktop and My Pictures directory, allowing others to write to them. SyncToy is then set up with two folder pairs, one for the desktop and one for My Pictures. Both computers have the same configuration so that the synchronization can be initiated from any one of them.
To make it easy to synchronize, I created a shortcut on the desktop that runs SyncToyCmd.exe -R (to do the actual synchronization, for all folder pairs). SyncToyCmd should normally be run as a scheduled task, but since both computers must be turned on for the synchronization to work, I opted for a shortcut instead.
Combined with Picasa, they can now offload pictures from their digital camera to any one of the computers and then simply synchronize them. Sweet!
