How to sync two computers?

Factual Questions
1

I have an HP iPAQ PDA and sync it to both my home computer and work laptop. This has the effect of synchronizing the two computers as well. I find that I am using the PDA less and less. If I ever decide to trash the PDA, is there a solution for regularly syncing the two computers directly? I am currently syncing Outlook calendar, tasks, and contact list; IE Favorites; and files in a particular directory.

2

This article from Life Hacker might help with the syncing of the files. I don’t use this. I use google docs to keep my few files that I want to access in multiple places online.

If you are willing to switch from IE to Firefox, you can install the google browser sync plug-in. This will take care of browser favorites, history, and cookie settings. I use this and I am pretty happy with it. There may be something similar for IE, but I am not aware of it. Alternatively, you can use del.icio.us/ to store all your bookmarks online. I use this for when I am away from any of my 3 synced computers.

I use google fro e-mail, contacts, tasks, and calendar - so I can’t help you there. Hopefully someone else will come along with ideas about that.

3

Since the folders/files do not seem that big, how about a flash drive and some software like Windows “SyncToy” link

4

I use a USB drive and a Batch file I wrote to copy the new files between directories I care about. This is great for backing up a computer too. You just need to create a file.bat file, right click it and edit it, and paste in commands like below. You need one set to copy from the computer to flash drive, and another to copy from the flash drive to computer. The only downside is if you ever “delete” a file, you have to delete it on all of the devices or it keeps popping back up.

XCOPY /e /d /y /i /h /r /v "C:\documents and settings\username\my documents\folder". "E:\documents\folder"
XCOPY /e /d /y /i /h /r /v "E:\documents\folder". "C:\documents and settings\username\my documents\folder"
You can just replace the folders of interest, and it works fine with servers too as long as you have the path correct.

5

I prefer a more manual sync, since I don’t always want to overwrite certain files. I use Beyond Compare,a very basic file/folder compare software. Works for me.