I have been looking into all kinds of data synchronization tools as of late. My primary goal has been to ensure downloading a camera onto one computer in the house would result in the pictures being available to the other computers.
In my looking around I found Live Mesh Not really the tool I was looking for, because it keeps a copy of the files on an online server. I am really excited about using Mesh to keep a folder synced between my work machine and home for keeping notes handy, getting pictures where I can grab them for blog posts, etc.
Back to the home network, my primary tool is SyncToy. It’s not the most user-friendly tool, so I don’t think Heather will adopt it as something she manually uses, but I have been able to schedule sync jobs from my machine. I hope to have Heather’s Vista laptop doing the same soon. There is a rather large side project involved, where I get to manually merge two huge photo collections before I can actually turn this thing loose with live data.
I turned WinRar loose on Heather’s primary picture collection (there is another one of pre-college pictures), and after a little over an hour of compressing, the .rar was roughly six gigs. That’s just the backup in case something horrible happens when I start merging pictures later this week…
Once that is all up and running, I think there are some cool Windows Home Server plugins that would do web-albums with a lot less hassle than what I am running on this website. I will have to look into that. Not to say its really hard to use Gallery… no I take that back… I don’t find it hard, Heather always gives up because it takes a lot of fiddling with things to make it play nice when you are setting things up or adding pictures. Here’s hoping the WHS plugin will be nicer 🙂
-Jordan
Nelsons 