After posting about my YouTube GreaseMonkey script earlier, I’m continuing the spirit of sharing ‘power user’ PC tips for everyday use.

So last night I was playing with my new laptop, installing my suite of applications on it and copying settings from Photoshop on my desktop PC over to it, when I suddenly had a brainwave – you can totally automate this kind of thing!

When you think about it, all your data can be mapped between various folders on the two. And anything that you don’t want overwritten or is specific to either machine can be filtered out. I found an incredibly nifty little program that allows you to do just this – synchronise your data to external drives, over a LAN or even over the internet via FTP!

There are three Massive benefits to this:

  1. Consistent computing environment
    • With a bit of time spent setting things up correctly, you can happily edit files on either machine and have them automatically update as if you hadn’t moved between computers at all. Even program settings, emails etc can be shared in this way.
  2. Constant automated backups
    • Since all your important data is in two places at all times, the likelihood of your important data being wiped out by a hardware failure is dramatically decreased.
  3. Automatic recovery in the event of extreme fail
    • So here’s what you do if you have to format either your laptop or desktop:
      1. Reinstall Windows, programs etc
      2. Install and configure the synchronisation program
      3. Run a sync!
    • You can even skip step 1 if you make a disk image of your hard drive on both PCs – With Windows installed & configured to your liking along with the synchronisation program, and any of your applications already installed in the way you like them set up. DriveImageXML is a free program which you can use to do exactly this. Then if a computer explodes you can just restore the image from a bootable CD, run the sync program, and bingo!

Great! How do I set it up?

Most Windows applications store their settings in C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR WINDOWS USERNAME]\Application Data\Local Settings and C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR WINDOWS USERNAME]\Local Settings\. Some may store them in C:\Program Files\.

Local Settings and Program Files are pretty much the only two places you need to think about as far as programs are concerned. Open Folder Sharing in the Properties dialog of these folders and make a new network share for them all so that your two computers can access the data over the network. You may have to enable “Advanced File Sharing” if you receive “Access Denied” errors that prevent you from accessing the folders, so that you can modify folder security settings. If in doubt the process here is identical to sharing any random folder on a Windows network. I additionally name my shares with “$” signs at the end of their names – this makes them invisible to Windows Explorer and will prevent others on the network from seeing them. If you want real security, you should create a user specifically for file synchronisation through the “Computer Management” panel, and setup sharing permissions so that only that user may access those shares. The “howto”-ness of this is left to your own Google searching :)

So what if you have different users on each PC (or even different Program Files directories, if you’re l33t), you might ask? The paths will be different – this may cause problems with your settings in some of your programs that use absolute URI’s to locate resources. But you can work around this, too! Just name all your paths using Windows Environment Variables – so whenever you pick a config file or something in your application that points to C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR WINDOWS USERNAME]\Application Data\Local Settings, just replace this part of the path with %AppData%. The similar variable for Program Files is just %ProgramFiles%. All there is to it! Windows automatically knows how to substitute these special wildcards in paths, and your files will magically be found, even if they’re in different locations. You can even define your own environment variables, by right clicking My Computer and going Properties » Advanced » Environment Variables.

…and you’re done! Whenever your computers sync (mine do it automatically the second my laptop connects to our router), all the settings you define are carried over as well. So if you’re doing something like adding bookmarks in Firefox or Changing your UI layout in Photoshop, the changes will magically and seamlessly be the same on both computers!

You can also setup a similar routine to backup your My Documents folder, music and any other data you could possibly think of.

So, next time you have some spare time or have to format – consider installing common programs and mapping automatic synchronisation scripts for their files between your desktop and laptop PC.

I’m sure there are many programs that can do this… I recommend one called ‘Alwaysync’, which you can download it (for free) from
http://allwaysync.com

Since you can sync over the internet, you could likely also setup a behaviour to synchronise your work PC with your workstation at home!