Syncing text files (and more)

So, I dig text files. About a week ago, I started using todotxt. It’s a pretty nifty little shell script that lets you quickly add todo items to a text file. Anyway, that’s not really what this post is about, so, moving right along…

I’ve been using plain text files more and more as of late. I’m keeping a brainstorm.txt for just that: brainstorming. If something ‘comes to me’ (so rare, yet so nice), I throw it in the text file. I’m also keeping a vocab.txt file for all of the German vocabulary I come across while reading or talking to my friends (particularly Marcel, a good German buddy of mine).

Unfortunately, there’s a problem. I use more than one computer. I regularly use at least 2, because that’s how many I have at home. I also use various computers at the university. So, the question arises: how do I keep my textual obsessions synced up nice and easy?

Answer: FolderShare. I’d never heard of it until I started googling for file-syncing apps. It turns out that Microsoft recently bought up FolderShare, which used to be a subscription service. Microsoft is now offering the service to everyone for free. Have I mentioned that I’m really starting to like Microsoft?

Here’s how FolderShare works (it’s quite simple): install the application on your first computer. Get an account. Install the application on your second computer, aid sign in with the same account information. Go to the FolderShare website, and set up a FolderShare library. Basically, this is just a thing that says, “keep all of the files in this folder [on computer A] synced up with all of the files in this folder [on computer B]“. You can have as many FolderShare libraries as you want.
If you want, you can enable an option in FolderShare that lets you access EVERY file on your computer via the web, as long as the computer you’re wanting to grab files from is also online, and running FolderShare. I’ve opted to leave this disabled for the time being, but if you need to get to your files frequently from a public computer, it’s a pretty sweet feature. Even if you don’t use that feature though, being able to easily and automatically keep your files synced between computers is.. well, really nice.

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