When was talk about syncing things with our computer, we are talking about keeping files aligned with each other.
For instance if we wanted to sync photos on our computer with our phone, they would then reflect exactly as they are on the phone, so they match and mirror.
These days, we have multiple devices which use the internet for emails, business, storing files, school or for fun. And most of us want to interactive with and use the same programs and files.
In order to have the same emails and files on each device we need to sync these files with online services to make it more useful.
There are plenty of services out there we can use that sync different things. I am going to discus in this post things people have heard of before and some things you might not have though to sync with your computer, laptop or mobile phone.
Dropbox
When talking about syncing its logical to start talking about a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive. Cloud services are just a fancy way of saying online storage – the cloud, the internet.
If you have multiple files you would like to access on multiple devices, such as pictures, documents, and media files, a program like Dropbox could be just what you need.
Dropbox works with all types of computers and most tablets and phones.
You install Dropbox on your device, save any files you want to sync with other devices in the main Dropbox directory and your done.
When you login to Dropbox on another device using the same username and password you will see your files. And when you make a change to any of these files in Dropbox they will reflect the same changes to the same files in your Dropbox on other devices.
Email IMAP
Email sucks. I don’t mean its bad, but it literally sucks.
When using an email client, to open an access an email from your email server storage, your email programs goes to your server and sucks down the email to your device.
The problem with this is, when you try and access your emails on another device, the client will look to the server storage and not see any emails because your previous devices viewed on has already sucked them down.
To fix this, the powers that be created a different type of email protocol which mirrors and syncs each device so email can be accessed equally no matter what you are using or where you are.
If you are having problems syncing emails on multiple devices is probably because you are still using the old POP protocols.
You need to look at your email providers details online and change them over to IMAP for your email to sync properly over multiple devices.
Web Browsers
Did you know you can sync your web browsers?
Web browsers are programs we use on most devices to access websites. Google make a web browser called Chrome, Microsoft make Internet Explorer and Edge and Mozilla have made Firefox.
There are many different types of browsers out there but these are the main 4 most people use.
People are very particular about what they look at online and how they do it. You can even access your emails through your web browser.
We spend a lot of time using our web browsers so it makes sense to sync them across multiple devices, that way we do not have to keep making changes every time we use them to reflect what we have done on other devices.
Syncing web browsers can includes settings, favourites and passwords.
