The Rise of Sync

Since the birth of the internet (sort of), it's been storing files which can be access by anyone on line. More recently, new technology such as dropbox have taken file sharing one step further and allowed for automatic synchronisation of folders over the cloud. But now there's more.

Once again, that philosophy is being taken one step further with synchronisation of much more than just ordinary files. Most web browsers now offer history syncing - extension syncing is also around. Ubuntu allows you to sync your apps across multiple computers - I'm guessing that's not far down the line on other systems (although there's third party software for macs already). Preferences, music and basically anything in your user folder is easy to sync with dropbox and the like - although with the amount of space most syncing apps offer multimedia isn't so easy to manage.

Sometimes I ask myself whether I really want this kind of synchronisation.

For starters, different computers are there to do different jobs. One might be a personal system, and the other a production system. If that's the case, why would I want to download some risky beta software onto my personal one, either to experiment or just for jokes, and find it wrecking havoc on my work computer?

If apps is bad enough, think about preferences - I can't run the same startup applications and services that I use on my workhorse desktop with quad core i5 CPU at 3.30 GHz, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD and 500GB storage with 1GB graphics and a 22" monitor as on my 5-year-old laptop with 2GB RAM, dual core CPU at 1.5GHz, 160GB storage with no graphics and a 16" screen.

And last, but certainly not least, my web history - again, I use my computers for different reasons and in different situations, so I see absolutely no need to fill up my history on each computer with data from the other which I will never use and only serves to slow my service as my cache is bloated.

So, while sync can be very useful in some cases, it's important to keep it real and think about where the software you actually need ends and the software you installed because it exists begins. I'm certainly not going any further than dropbox.