It feels like it's been years since Microsoft released SyncToy 2.0. That's probably because it has been. But when you have a utility that's dead simple to use that lets you synchronize files between two folders, hard drives, or other storage media, why bother updating it? But SyncToy 2.0 wasn't exactly perfect, so Microsoft recently pushed out version 2.1 which features a handful of bug fixes and improvements.

Like earlier versions, SyncToy 2.1 lets you create folder pairs and decide how data will be synchronized between those two folders. In Synchronize mode, when changes are made in one folder they'll be reflected in the other. If you add a file to folder A, it will be added to folder B. Delete one from B and it'll disappear from A.

Echo mode makes sure that folder B is always up to date with folder A. But if you make changes to folder B, they won't be reflected in the first folder.

In Contribute mode, files will copied from A to B and any files that are renamed in A will be renamed in B. But no files will be deleted. So if you delete a file from folder A it will still live on in B.

All three modes are pretty handy for making sure you have a backup of your important data. You can backup your files to a local drive or a shared network drive for safe keeping.

Probably the closest thing to a new feature in SyncToy 2.1 is the ability to backup your folder pair configurations. Microsoft also says that version 2.1 features better performance, faster copy speeds, and more resilience against network and file system errors. A few bugs have also been fixed, including one that could lead to data corruption when using NAS drives.

SyncToy 2.1 is available as a free download for Windows computers.

[via Lifehacker]

On today's This Week in Google, Gina Trapani presented a tip on how to synchronize your Google Calendar to iCal on a Mac. As it turns out, it is possible to subscribe to sub-calendars, but it's not immediately obvious how to do so. The same holds true on the iPhone.

If you've attempted to synchronize your Google Calendar to your iPhone only to be disappointed that it only allows you to synchronize one calendar, you'll be happy to discover that although it's somewhat hidden, there is a way to synchronize multiple calendars.

Once you configure your iPhone to synchronize with your Google account using your phone's Exchange functionality, you should have your contacts and primary calendar items synchronizing. To then choose what other calendars to display, use the instructions given on this page. They will instruct you to visit m.google.com/sync on your phone, which gives you the option to set some sync settings.

One big frustration with the iPhone's calendar is that though it displays multiple calendars in different colors, it doesn't give you any control over a given calendar's color. With some patience and fiddling, you can use the Google Sync settings described above to enable one calendar at at time and get them set to the color you want. If your primary calendar is the wrong color, it's harder to make it switch, but you can do it by disabling calendar synchronization entirely on the phone, then changing which calendars are synchronized via the Google Sync page, then re-enabling it. It takes trial and error, but with enough patience you can get things set up just as you want, as long as the colors you want consist of red, blue, orange, green, and/or purple.

Sure, Google began rolling out the ability to synchronize your bookmarks across various instances of the Google Chrome browser yesterday. And that means you can make sure that your bookmarks are up to date on your home and work computers, as well as your netbook, home theater PC, and any other machines you happen to have that are running Google Chrome. But what if you want to keep your Chrome bookmarks synchronized with your Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari bookmarks?

Xmarks makes a popular plugin for those browsers that lets you not only backup and synchronize your bookmarks, but also your saved passwords. That means you can create a bookmark or save your login and password information for a site in Firefox on one computer, load Internet Explorer on the same PC or another, and have the same passwords and bookmarks.

And now Xmarks is working on a Google Chrome plugin. Of course, the stable version of Chrome doesn't support plugins yet, so you'll need to use the developer channel version of Chrome. If you're already using Chrome, one of the easiest ways to switch channels is to use the Google Channel Changer and then when Chrome checks for updates it will install the latest developer build.

Xmarks for Chrome is still in the early alpha stages. You can sign up to request an invitation. But you should keep in mind that we're talking about using a pre-release plugin on a pre-release browser, so don't expect a flawless user experience at this point.

Google Chrome is a pretty slick web browser. It's fast, doesn't have a lot of toolbars cluttering the window, and runs each browser tab as a separate process which makes it harder to crash the whole browser. But there's one thing that's kept me from switching to Chrome full-time: The lack of a good way to synchronize your browser settings over the internet.

If you use Firefox, you can install the Mozilla Weave or Xmarks extensions to synchronize your bookmarks and other settings across multiple computers. Add a bookmark on one machine and it will show up in Firefox on your other machine. If you use multiple computers on a regular basis, this can be a killer feature. And Chrome doesn't have it... yet.

But according to a message on the Chromium development list, Google plans to add the ability to synchronize your settings using your Google account.

The feature will first be available in the experimental "Chromium" builds of the browser, but should eventually make their way to the stable Google Chrome release. At first, Google Chrome will only offer bookmark synchronization. The ability to synchronize other preferences and data may come in the future.

In a way, this should all be old hat for Google. After all, one of the first bookmark synchronization plugins for Firefox was the now-defunct Google Browser Sync.

[via Ars Technica]

When we first got a sniff of Chrome from the infamous comic book pages, most of us figured that a Google browser would feature tight integration with Google's web-based services. Though I guess if you count the metrics Google gathers via Chrome, that counts as a kind of integration. It's just not what we were looking for.

What about things like Web History (which I still find just a tad creepy) and Bookmarks?

Thanks to a new extension, you can now easily add Google Bookmarks support to Chrome. Grab GBX from Uninformed Opinion and you'll be enjoying bookmark portability bliss in no time. After compiling my list of 15+ bookmarklets, I was glad to get my hands on GBX to keep my home and work systems running in step (and finally get my pitifully outdated Google Bookmarks current).

After installing GBX, you have the option of replacing your bookmarks bar, adding a Google Bookmarks folder to it, or loading your items into the 'other bookmarks' folder. You can also customize the folder hierarchy and sort order and choose how often you want to refresh the folder.

At last, a simple way to keep at least your bookmarks in sync across multiple machines running Chrome!

Over the past few years, a cottage industry has formed around the idea of allowing users to synchronize their mobile Google contact and calendar items with mobile devices. Today, Google got in on the action by announcing that iPhone and Windows Mobile devices could now be synchronized with Google Calendar and your Gmail contact list.

Google Sync is using Microsoft ActiveSync push technology to keep your contacts and calendar appointment up to date. Once you set up your phone, your information should update continuously, with no user intervention required.

In order to synchronize your contact list, your phone will need to support SyncML. Google Sync is currently in beta, which means it's a real Google product. But it also means there may still be some kinks to work out. It's also important to note that Google Sync will replace all the data on your device with information from the server, so you'll want to make sure to back up your data before trying it out.

Foxmarks provides a simple way to keep your Firefox bookmarks synchronized across multiple computers or Firefox profiles. Just install the plugin and any time you add or remove a bookmark from one computer the changes will be reflected on Firefox on any other computer you use. This comes in handy if you want to sync the bookmarks on your home and work computers, or if you have a portable version of Firefox that you keep on a USB flash drive for use while you're traveling, but which you want to keep up to date.

This week the Foxmarks team released tools that let you synchronize your Internet Explorer and Safari bookmarks as well. That means you can sync your IE7 bookmarks at home and work. But it also means you can keep your bookmarks on all three browsers synchronized.

The new tools don't support password synchronization, a feature that Foxmarks added for the Firefox plugin a while back. But it's still a pretty awesome development, especially for anyone who uses Internet Explorer at Work and Firefox at home.

[via Lifehacker]

About three years after acquiring FolderShare, a utility for synchronizing files across multiple computers, Microsoft is retiring the application and plans to replace it with a similar utility called Windows Live Sync. You could make the case that what's happening is Microsoft is renaming FolderShare rather than replacing it, as the new version will likely look a lot like FolderShare and have many of the same functions. But it will also have a few improvements including:

• Ability to sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each
• You can login with your Windows Live ID
• Integration with the Windos Recycle Bin
• New clients for Windows and Mac
• Unicode support for synchronizing files in other languages (beside English)

Why Microsoft is continuing to push this software at the same time as it develops Windows Live Mesh which allows you to synchronize files across mutilple computers, the web, and mobile devices, is anyone's guess.

Soocial is a free web service that provides a central location for all of your contacts' phone numbers, email addresses, and other information. If that's all Soocial provided, it wouldn't be that interesting. But Soocial goes a few steps further and allows you to synchronize your contacts across multiple platforms, including your cellphone, Mac, PC, and Gmail.

Yesterday the company released a utility for Outlook synchronization that supports Windows XP and Vista and Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007. While the Outlook sync plugin is in alpha and Soocial recommends backing up your contacts before running, I didn't experience any problems. In a matter of minutes, all of my contacts were backed up online and accessible through the Soocial web site.

Gmail sync, on the other hand is a bit slower. I've been waiting about an hour for the Gmail synchronization to kick in. If and when it does, Soocial wil fill in the next piece of a synchronization puzzle that I've been struggling with for ages. Using Soocial, you'll be able to keep your Outlook and Google contacts in sync, and using Calgoo or Google Calendar Sync, you'll be able to synchronize your Outlook calendar with Google Calendar. And that means you'll be able to update your information on any computer with a web browser, knowing that the changes will be synched to your primary computer and any mobile devices like cellphones and PDAs that you keep synched with Outlook.

Now would someone please release a tool that synchronizes Outlook tasks with Remember the Milk?

Soocial also plans to release a BlackBerry client soon, and already supports hundreds of cellphones.

[via Decoder and TechCrunch]

Foxmarks is a plugin for Firefox that makes it easy to keep your bookmarks synchronized across multiple browsers. When you add or delete a bookmark on one machine, the changes will be reflected on another. Pretty useful for keeping your home and work computers up to date, right? But what about all those passwords you have saved on one computer but not the other. Now Foxmarks has a solution for that too.

The most recent version of Foxmarks adds support for secure password synchronization. In order to use this feature you'll need to enter a new PIN which is separate from the password you use to login to Foxmarks. For security purposes, if you forget this PIN, Foxmarks will not be able to help you recover it, so make sure to write it down or pick something you'll remember. But for obvious reasons, make sure it's also not something that's easy to guess (unless you like the idea of synchronizing your online banking password over the internet with only your birthday as a password).

[via jkOnTheRun]

It seems like the days of the family computer have come and gone already, and more and more people have their own individual computer to use. In my house, everyone over the age of 3 has one (plus a couple of extras), and keeping data synchronized amongst them all is a bit of a nightmare.

Our main two machines are the Macs that my wife and I use. In our family, I'm the techie one, so over the years I've spent a lot of time ripping our CD collections into MP3 files. Though she certainly enjoys listening to music, she's never bothered to do the same on her machine. The other day she decided that she should have access to all of the music that I've been dutifully ripping from our CD collection, and since 1/2 of the CDs were hers in the first place, she's right.

So, what's the fastest way to get my iTunes library over to her machine, while maintaining the song ratings and playlists that we've come up with together? I found an application called Syncopation that fits the bill perfectly.

Syncopation does exactly what I've described - it allows you to grab an entire music library from another machine over your local network. It even supports synchronizing podcasts, movies and TV shows! The process is very straightforward:

1. Install Syncopation on both the machine you want to synchronize from, and the machine you are moving the music to
2. Set your preferences; do you want to transfer videos and podcasts, or no?
3. Subscribe to the other machine that should be showing up in Syncopation's browser
4. Press the Sync button, and wait.
   
5. And wait, and wait, and wait.

Depending on how big your library is and how fast your network is, it could take a number of hours to transfer everything across. On our 802.11g network, it is taking about an hour per gigabyte transferred.

You'll have to keep Syncopation running on all machines that are actively synchronizing while they perform the transfer. Syncopation supports up to five Macs, though the trial verison only supports two, and the trial is good for 30 days. I see myself purchasing this tool when my trial period is up, because it makes keeping our iTunes libraries in sync a snap.

FeedDemon has been the best RSS news reading application on the Windows platform for a long time. The folks at NewsGator certainly thought so, and instead of building their own standalone news aggregator for Windows, they bought FeedDemon. The best news is that though FeedDemon was at one time a commercial product (and worth every penny), it's now available for free.

Even when it was a standalone application FeedDemon got news reading right. The user interface is easy to interact with, and the application is solid. But now that it is a client for NewsGator's web application, it has gained another whole level of usefulness. FeedDemon synchronizes with your NewsGator account giving you the ability to keep your feeds in sync between it, your NewsGator web account, and any other clients you choose to use from NewsGator, including ones for most mobile phones, and even Macs.

Since I became irked with the limitations of Allway Sync's free edition, I've been looking for a good replacement. I've been getting by with the MS Synctoy, but thankfully a kick-ass open source app has once again come to the rescue.

Synkron is a powerful, cross-platform synchronization tool that boasts an impressive array of features.

During the install the option is given to add a context menu extension. Oh yes, I'll have that. I work my context menu like a rented mule, and if I can add one-click synchronization to it, you'd better believe I'm going to.

The program sports a tabbed interface, making it easy to set up, run, and manage multiple jobs. The interface is uncluttered and easy to understand. Folder analysis is extremely fast, and files, file types, and folders can be blacklisted to exclude them from synchronizations.

Since the dawn of time Google Calendar, we've been waiting for a free, easy way to fully synchronize our Google Calendar to desktop calendar clients like iCal. We'd love to be able to access the same calendar data across multiple computers, but it's always been a messy affair, not free, an incomplete solution, or PC only.

Well, Calgoo has been one of those paid options up until now, but the minds behind the program just announced that it is free from here on out. That's right, Calgoo is now the free option in Google Calendar and desktop caledar synchronization. Calgoo officially supports 30 Boxes, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, and -- of course -- Google Calendar.

Calgoo's "Chief Owl" will not employ ads in the app in order to pay for the costs of developing the program, but the team will begin to run ads on Calgoo Hub and possibly other future products. As for the software itself, it's pretty easy to use, and it provides for two-way synchonization, which means that any changes on one calendar will apply to the other.

[via WebWorkerDaily]