Syncing

To help you jump start the new year, we’re posting thirty-one technology and business treats, one for each day of January.

I had an epiphany this morning. I was thinking through the subtleties that drive me nuts about technology. I’m pretty sure I drive Cloudtippers tech guru Sam nuts too. Sometimes it seems like he’s splitting hairs about these little nuances about how certain technology works. He usually says something about data being 1s and 0s and it’s either a 1 or a 0. It’s not 0.0239459384 or any other number in-between 0 and 1. Since it’s only going to be one way or the other, and never anything else no matter how much I try to make it bend, the hair splitting makes total sense now! When I understand how the hairs are split, I’m able to assess, evaluate, and implement the best solution for me!

So, here’s today’s hair splitting: syncing. Syncing is the mechanism to assure that two or more pieces of data are identical after changes have been made.

Here’s the scenario: You’re getting ready for a well-deserved long weekend away. You’ve committed to your spouse that you will not bring your laptop. However, you do need to have the latest information your team is assembling in case there’s a last minute question in the deal your team is handling. You decide to bring your iPad and, whatever additions your team makes to the deal files, you will have the most current information because you’ve set up automatic syncing.

Syncing is a great solution when you have multiple places (or devices) by which to access your data and you want the same data in all of those places. There are only a few things you must take into consideration:

1. What is it you want to sync? File? Folder? Document?

2. What app will you use? The app is the mechanism that allows you to access your synced item later.

Here’s how it works: You select the app DropBox as the home for your mission critical documents. The app is in the cloud, on your laptop, on your iPad, and on your iPhone. You create a mission critical document in an Excel spreadsheet on your laptop. Once you finished it, you uploaded it to your Mission Critical folder on DropBox. Later on, you add some new information to your spreadsheet. It syncs along all of your devices where you have the DropBox app.

If you want to pull the rest of your hear out, here’s something else to consider: Since you created this mission critical document in a specific application, Excel, and you want to be able to access that document that may not have Excel (that’s a contingency that should always be considered for mission critical situations), you may also want to save that file in another app (like Google spreadsheet that can be accessed online since it’s a web app) using its syncing capabilities.