Now that I have centralized my digital life on to a desktop, there are a few issues that came up. Like how to manage content across a desktop, two laptops, a smartphone, and pmp's.
There are current cloud based solutions, like dropbox and sugarsync, but unless you plan on paying, it's unlikely that they will handle all of your needs. Neither will Skydrive. Homegroup may give me access to files on other PC's while on the home network, but that does nothing for me when I'm not home.
My solution has three parts, taking a little bit of old with some new. For work releated items, I use Windows Live Mesh. Because I love me some Office, I take full advantage of Office Web Apps. I just set up the sync in Mesh, and I'm all set. With a current limit of 5GB, I felt the need to split out my solution. If they had more space available, this would probably be my only solution.
For *some* pictures and video, I use dropbox. I put all of my baby pictures, cake snapshots (for my Wife's business), phone snapshots, and phone video into my dropbox folder. Dropbox is great, and I have it installed on every PC/Laptop (including my Ubuntu and XP VM's).
Finally - Pictures and Music. Easily my two largest libraries at around 60GB, this is where I am still in flux. I use Rhapsody, so I can stream on all my devices without issue, and I can download items to any machine as needed for offline playback. The issue is syncing previously purchased content across machines. This is the promise of iTunes in the cloud and Google Music. I'm sure that iTunes will be flawless right out of the gate (other than the fact that it's iTunes) and I'm still waiting on my invite to Google Music. There is also Amazon's cloud player. I really wish that Rhapsody would get on this bandwagon, but with rumored FB integration coming, maybe they don't feel the need.
I basically created several batch files to move my files around as needed. I scheduled the batch files to run with Windows Task Scheduler. For example, every day, a batch file runs that copies media moved from my HTC EVO into a folder up into the standard Windows pictures and videos libraries. This runs on all laptops and the PC. Every Fiday at 5:00, another scheduled batch file copies my libraries from all laptops and PC's to my GoFlex Home. It's like a dropbox folder, except done the (really) old fashioned way ;) As soon as a single provider can fire up an elegant, cross-platform solution (editing all doc tyes, streaming of images and music), I'll be the first to hop on board. Automating this is why I am re-obsessed with my .bat's all over again. Sample below.I used quotes in my folder path because some folder names have spaces. For help with any of the batch commands, open a cmd prompt, type the command, and then "/?". Hit enter.
rem sample copy/move script
move /Y "C:\from folder path\*.jpg" "C:\to folder path\folder"
move /Y "C:\from folder path\*.3gp" "C:\to folder path\folder"
xcopy "C:\from folder path" "C:\path to dropbox folder" /S /E /Y
if exist z: (
xcopy C:\Users\XXXX\Music Z:\Music /S /E /Y
xcopy C:\Users\XXXX\Pictures Z:\Pictures /S /E /Y
xcopy C:\Users\XXXX\Videos Z:\Videos /S /E /Y
) else (
echo Backup drive not found
pause
)
