So, you have documents or other files that you want to synchronize between multiple computers, but you don’t want those files to be stored on a cloud service. How do you do it?
There are many ways to do this of course, but one popular way is a piece of software called GoodSync that is available for Mac or Windows.
A few months ago, I posted a great video by George Holt that runs through how to synchronize your documents with a USB key. I finally had a chance to try GoodSync myself, so I will go through how to synchronize the files between computers.
I don’t have two Windows computers to test this on, so I will be synchronizing from a Windows computer to a Mac computer.
Install
To start, you need to download and install the GoodSync client. If you want to synchronize your documents with an external drive, a USB key, or an online server like FTP or Amazon S3, you just need to install the client on the one computer.
If you want to synchronize between different computers, you’ll need to install the client on each machine.
When you first install the program, it asks you if you want to use GoodSync Connect or not.
“Wait a minute Brooks,” you might say, “I thought the whole point of using GoodSync was to not store our documents online. What’s with this Connect thing?”
The way GoodSync Connect works is that it allows your computers to find each other. Your actual documents are not transferred to the service.
You can, of course, choose to not use Connect, and just synchronize your documents with local servers. For the purposes of this demonstration, I will be enabling it.
Job Creation
GoodSync thinks of anything that you might want to do with it as a Job, so your first step is to create a new Job.
You can choose Synchronize or Backup. In our case, we want changes to be reflected both ways, so we will choose Synchronize.
Left Hand First
Even though we are synchronizing, GoodSync setup works in a left-to-right manner. First you say where your documents are coming from (the Left).
If your documents are mostly the same in both places and you just want to synchronize things going forward, don’t worry about it. Just pick one of them to be the Left.
To set it, click the left Browse button and choose where on your computer the documents you want to Sync are.
Right Hand Second
Then we need to choose the folder on the Right (where things are going to). We do this by clicking the Browse button on the right.
As with the Left, you are given a list of locations on the left-hand side of the pop-up to choose from. It can be on your computer, on some Windows shares, WebDAV, FTP, S3, Google Drive, etc.
In our example, I will be choosing GoodSync Connect, and will pick a folder on my Mac’s Desktop to Synchronize with.
Analyze & Sync
When the Left and Right locations are set, it is time to hit Analyze.
When you hit the Analyze button, it goes through both sides and sees what changes (if any) are made. Once Analyze is done, you can hit the All, Changes, and other buttons to see what changes will be made. When you’re comfortable with the changes, hit the Sync button and it will do its thing.
Enjoy
Once the synchronize process finished, I had my original folder on Windows:
and the equivalent folder on my Mac:
As an additional test, I renamed one of the files on my Mac, and hit Analyze and Sync again. The name was changed on Windows.
One minor issue: the first time I ran the sync, I was not able to open the folder on my Mac because the permissions were not correct. Once I fixed that, it was fine.
I tried again by synchronizing to an already existing folder, and that worked. So, if you are going from Windows to Mac, I recommend creating the root folder on your Mac first.
GoodSync is $29.95 for Windows and $39.95 for the Mac. There is a 30 Day free trial to give it a go.
As I said before, there are lots of ways to synchronize your documents, but if you are wanting one that does the heavy lifting for you and doesn’t store them in the cloud, GoodSync is a solid option.
