Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Finally in-sync
Sometimes, the bundled solution isn't the best. This definitely applies to some of the tools within Windows Vista. This time I'm talking about syncing offline files, but first, some context.
Yes, another Vista rant. But I'm entitled to this one, having been through the pain of having to completely reinstall Vista on my notebook. I had actually weighed everything up and had decided to revert to XP, except that Vista seems to have done something proprietary to the MBR on my hard drive and the XP installer couldn't see it. There was NO WAY that I was going to make fresh backup copies of the 30 or 40GB-worth of data on my D and E drives and then format the whole drive. Just forget it.
Anyway, having reinstalled Vista I made the mistake of reactivating it on the first day - and of course the install was corrupted, because after a shaky six days I needed to reinstall again. This time I couldn't afford any offline time at all so went out and bought a spare notebook, which has now been deployed as an upgrade for a colleague. She's delighted...
Fingers crossed this time around and no I could not wait for SP1 to come out. For the first ever time, I chose the "upgrade" option - upgrading a non-functional version of Vista to a functional version is an upgrade, right? And yes, I'm back in the honeymoon period where the system is actually really quite fast despite having only 1.5GB of memory. I picked up a 4GB USB stick at CeBIT which works nicely with readyboost and my apps open a bit faster, too.
Of course there is an upside to a clean install - you lose some of the drekk that's built up on the system. Programs that I'd installed, messed around with and then dumped. From here I have resolved to restrict such installations first to my XP VM that's running in VMware Player (Google around to find out how, it's pretty simple with QEMU) as it's pretty simple to roll back a VM, also I have a couple of backup copies on various drives.
Getting to the point, I sometimes for convenience carry around a local copy of important ongoing work files - because I can't be online when travelling. I decided to once again try the sync option built into Windows, but it still sucks really badly and leaves multiple temp files at both ends when trying to sync - I haven't had the time, energy or inclination to solve this. Instead I spent a whole $30 (about the price of a Chinese take-away for two now in Euros) on a super little program called GoodSync from a company called Siber Systems.
It's my second $30 purchase from Siber - the first being the wonderful RoboForm, which stores all my login passwords and other credentials, including my credit card details, and helps me fill-in online forms. I keep the RoboForm data on a fully-encrypted USB drive so the data is safe and sound.
GoodSync is exactly that - and it's lightning fast, too. This is perhaps the most visible difference between it and the built-in offline file sync capability of Vista, apart from those temp files which can quickly fill a few GB if you're not careful. Once again, proof for me that something that's free has no value.
Yes, another Vista rant. But I'm entitled to this one, having been through the pain of having to completely reinstall Vista on my notebook. I had actually weighed everything up and had decided to revert to XP, except that Vista seems to have done something proprietary to the MBR on my hard drive and the XP installer couldn't see it. There was NO WAY that I was going to make fresh backup copies of the 30 or 40GB-worth of data on my D and E drives and then format the whole drive. Just forget it.
Anyway, having reinstalled Vista I made the mistake of reactivating it on the first day - and of course the install was corrupted, because after a shaky six days I needed to reinstall again. This time I couldn't afford any offline time at all so went out and bought a spare notebook, which has now been deployed as an upgrade for a colleague. She's delighted...
Fingers crossed this time around and no I could not wait for SP1 to come out. For the first ever time, I chose the "upgrade" option - upgrading a non-functional version of Vista to a functional version is an upgrade, right? And yes, I'm back in the honeymoon period where the system is actually really quite fast despite having only 1.5GB of memory. I picked up a 4GB USB stick at CeBIT which works nicely with readyboost and my apps open a bit faster, too.
Of course there is an upside to a clean install - you lose some of the drekk that's built up on the system. Programs that I'd installed, messed around with and then dumped. From here I have resolved to restrict such installations first to my XP VM that's running in VMware Player (Google around to find out how, it's pretty simple with QEMU) as it's pretty simple to roll back a VM, also I have a couple of backup copies on various drives.
Getting to the point, I sometimes for convenience carry around a local copy of important ongoing work files - because I can't be online when travelling. I decided to once again try the sync option built into Windows, but it still sucks really badly and leaves multiple temp files at both ends when trying to sync - I haven't had the time, energy or inclination to solve this. Instead I spent a whole $30 (about the price of a Chinese take-away for two now in Euros) on a super little program called GoodSync from a company called Siber Systems.
It's my second $30 purchase from Siber - the first being the wonderful RoboForm, which stores all my login passwords and other credentials, including my credit card details, and helps me fill-in online forms. I keep the RoboForm data on a fully-encrypted USB drive so the data is safe and sound.
GoodSync is exactly that - and it's lightning fast, too. This is perhaps the most visible difference between it and the built-in offline file sync capability of Vista, apart from those temp files which can quickly fill a few GB if you're not careful. Once again, proof for me that something that's free has no value.
Labels: nerd, rant, tech, virtualization
# posted by Nesjo : 10:52
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