SugarSynch
Software Review Part 1
An introduction to synchronization
software and to Sugar Synch
|
|
Automatically update
your other computer(s) as you make changes on any one of
them with the Sugar Synch software.
This works so well it is almost like magic.
Part 1 of a two part
series on Sugar Synch and other types of backup and
synchronization software - please
also visit
1.
An introduction to synchronization
software and to Sugar Synch
2.
Other considerations, pricing, and competitors
|
If there's an Achilles' Heel
to most of our computer systems, it is not having adequate
backup - we don't back up everything we should, and we don't do
it regularly enough, and mostly, we don't even safely store the
backup data away from the computer itself.
And if there's a continual
hassle and frustration that increasing numbers of us face, it is when
we are using several
different computers and trying to keep the same data up to date
on all of them.
SugarSynch is a low cost and
very simple way of doing both these things. Best of all,
it is automatic, so there's nothing for you to do or to forget.
What Sugar Synch Does
Sugar Synch runs in the
background as an 'always on' application on your computer or
computers. It is 'unobtrusive' which means it seldom
interferes with your normal working - you don't notice its
operation in the background.
When you first install it,
you tell it which directories you wish it to monitor. It
then proceeds to do two main things (and some less important
things too).
Part One - Automatic backing
up
Sugarsynch detects any time a new file appears, disappears, or is modified
in any of its monitored directories, and, as soon as a change
occurs in the directory, it copies that change to a remote
central server location.
If your computer is offline
at the time, it remembers the changes and, next time the
computer is online, it proceeds to copy the changes through
to the central server in the background.
This means that your system
is being automatically backed up, all the time, without you
having to do anything. It also means the backed up data is
stored securely off-site. So if you were to have a fire or
some other type of disaster, even though you might lose your
computer, you wouldn't also lose your backed up data.
Part Two - Synchronizing
This is the really magical
'value add' and logical extension to the backing up concept.
These days, many of us have
more than one computer. We have a computer at work, we
have a computer at home, and we might have a laptop computer as
well. Some of us even have additional computers in RVs,
boats, second homes, and who knows what else and where else.
If you have Sugarsynch
installed on more than one computer, you can instruct it not
only to automatically backup your data, but also to synchronize
some or all of it, across some or all of your multiple
computers.
This also is completely
automatic and runs in the background, the same as the backing
up.
The computers that are being
synchronized don't even need to be switched on at the same time,
because all the synchronization is routed through the central
server. Sugar Synch simply monitors both the data on the
computer on which it is installed and also the data on the
central server, and anytime the data is updated at either
location, it then flows the updated data to the other location
as soon as it can.
Even More Features
In addition to backing up
and synchronizing your data, Sugar Synch offers two other
related services.
Part Three - Web access to your data
Sugarsynch creates a secure,
password protected, web-interface that you can access from
anywhere in the world, through any normal web browser.
You can access the data
Sugarsynch stores for you on its central servers through this web interface. So
maybe you're at a friend's house and want to show them some of
your holiday photos, or maybe you're at a client's office and
wish to look up or present some information.
If you don't have the data
and your own computer with you, borrow one of theirs to take the
data from your Sugarsynch storage.
This is amazing. Now
you'll never be without all your information, wherever you are
in the world, even if you don't have your computer with you.
Part Four - Phone access to your photos
and data
If you have a web browser
equipped mobile phone, you can obviously access your data
through Sugar Synch's web browser interface.
In addition, Sugar Synch
offers an extra feature for Blackberries and some other types of
phones where it will automatically transfer any stored pictures
in your backup/synched data to the phone. It first
downsizes them so as to take very little space on the phone and
then sends them to the phone.
This is presumably to make
it easy for you to show off pictures to friends and family from
your phone, wherever you happen to be at the time. It is
hardly a reason to rush out and buy Sugarsynch, but some people
might find it a nice extra feature.
Sugarsynch Free Trial
A friend originally told me
about Sugarsynch, and enthusiastically endorsed the product
based on his own experiences (thanks, Fred!). He told me I
had to try the product, too, so I went to
their website and with
some reservations, agreed to their free trial download offer.
A 'free
trial' of any software all too often seems to involve giving your credit card
and all sorts of other personal data to the company, with the
threat of a 'if you don't cancel, we'll then start billing you
whether you want us to or not' type of scenario unfolding, and I
generally find all the questions asked somewhere between
intrusive and offensive.
Not so with Sugarsynch.
The bare minimum of information was requested, and, to my
delight, I didn't have to give them my credit card details.
This truly was a free trial, and with no way they could turn
around and start charging me at the end of the trial.
Sometimes you just know,
from the first contact with a company and their product, that
you're going to enjoy the experience, and this was definitely a
case where I felt immediately positive, due to their very fair
approach to the free trial. You can take a
free trial direct from their website, here.
Using Sugar Synch
Using the software is very
simple. You download a 6.75MB file that installs itself
onto your computer(s).
You then work through the
directories and sub-directories on your computer, telling Sugar
Synch which ones you want to be backed up and/or synchronized
with other computers.
You can specify which
directories you wish managed by Sugarsynch, but you can't
specify which files you want within a directory to be managed. If you
have a directory that has a mix of files you want backed up and
files you don't want backed up, you should create a second
directory so that one directory can be exclusively of files to be backed
up and the other is of files you don't want backed up.
Once you've done that,
you're probably unlikely to want or need to do much more, ever.
Just leave Sugarsynch to run in quietly in the
background.
Using Sugarsynch when
traveling internationally
Corporate users who travel
internationally may find Sugar Synch to be particularly useful.
Due to the danger of having laptops seized and
impounded/inspected when crossing borders these days, many
companies are now not allowing their executives to travel with
any company data on their laptops. Sugarsynch would allow
you to simply re-synch up your 'wiped clean' laptop once arriving at
your foreign destination, and, of course, when you go to travel
home again, it is an easy matter to wipe your disk clean again
before traveling and have your synched files waiting for you
upon returning back to the office.
A word of warning in such
cases - be careful that Sugarsynch doesn't misinterpret your
deleting files off your laptop's hard drive as a request to delete the
files everywhere! Instead, you should first stop synching
the relevant folders, then delete them, so as not to have
Sugarsynch helpfully delete the files everywhere else, too.
But, if you should
accidentally tell Sugarsynch to delete a file from everywhere,
there's no need to panic. Sugarsynch keeps its version of
a 'recycle bin' and it is very easy to undelete a mistakenly
deleted file.
Turning Sugarsynch off when
internet constrained
Sometimes you might find
yourself stuck somewhere with terribly slow internet. And
sometimes you might find yourself where you're being charged for
every MB of data you are sending and receiving on the internet.
In both these cases, it
might be a good idea to temporarily turn Sugarsynch off so as to
cut down on non-essential network traffic. This will keep
your speed up as much as possible, and your costs down as low as
possible.
Sugarsynch automatically
loads when you start your computer, so you simply need to close
it down again and it won't run until the next time you
reboot or restart the computer.
Cross platform compatibility
Which is a fancy way of
saying that Sugarsynch works on both Macs and PCs, although note
that the Mac version is still in late Beta testing, with some
known issues.
Making precious hard disk
space go further
Maybe you've got a computer
at work with 250GB of hard disk space, a computer at home with
150 GB of hard disk space, and a laptop with only 80GB of hard
disk space.
Perhaps your laptop hard
drive is already close to full, and while you'd like to keep a
complete copy of your work files on the laptop 'just in case '
you need them while traveling, you simply don't have the space
to put everything on the laptop. And, of course, Murphy's
Law being what it is, the one file you most need - perhaps when
concluding a major presentation on the other side of the world -
will be one of the files you didn't copy over to your laptop.
Sugarsynch has an excellent
solution for such situations. You make online backup
copies of everything from your main computer, but don't
synchronize them to your laptop. Instead, if you should
ever need one of these additional files, you simply download it
to the laptop as and when you need it.
I use this feature myself
with pictures. I've an increasing number of gigabytes of
pictures, and while I've plenty of space for them on my main
computer's hard disk, I don't have space for them on my laptop.
So I back them up up onto the Sugarsynch server, and then,
any time I might need a picture on my laptop, I just go to the
Sugarsynch server and download it. This is even easier
than it sounds, and very fast.
Can't back up network or
removable drive contents
Strangely, Sugarsynch will
only work with your local hard drives. You can't back up
or synchronize data on a network drive or on a removable drive (eg
a USB thumb drive or a camera memory card).
If you have data on such
media that you wish to backup or synchronize, you'd have to
first copy it to a directory on your local hard drive and then
synchronize it from there.
No version control
When Sugarsynch updates a
file with a newer version of itself, it doesn't offer any
version control features. That is, it simply overwrites
the older file with the newer one, and doesn't let you keep both
the older and the newer version of the file.
Few people seek version
control capabilities, so unless you really need this, it is
probably not an important omission. And, for those few
people who do wish such a feature, it has been broadly hinted to
us that Sugarsynch will start offering a version control feature
at some time between now and the end of the year.
NOTE : Big Problem with
Files Destroyed
Read on to the second page of
this review for details of how Sugarsync automatically overwrote
more recent copies of files with older copies of the same files,
causing us to lose data.
Support
A weakness of the product is
there are no real-time support options. If you have a
problem, your only choice is to wander around their website in
the hope of finding a FAQ type solution, or to send in a formal
request for assistance by email and get an email reply back
again.
However, one's expectation
for 24/7 toll-free support has to be tempered with an acceptance
of what we are paying for Sugarsynch. If you're on a 10GB
or 30GB plan, you're paying them $2.50 or $5 a month for their
service, and with the cost of live support probably exceeding
$2.50 a minute, a single phone call to support could end up
consuming your entire year's subscription; a situation that
would make it hard for Sugarsynch to be profitable, especially
if many of the service/support calls were (as they invariably
are) questions to which answers are already available online and
in the help files.
A couple of test messages to
support were quickly responded to with helpful sensible answers.
One Type of File that Can't be
Backed Up or Synched (yet)
The good news is that
Sugarsynch will back up and synchronize just about every type of
file imaginable, including even digital rights protected music
and video files.
But there is one type of
file it can't handle (yet), and that is an Outlook PST or OST
file.
The reason for this is
because most of us have fairly large PST/OST files, and they
change all the time. Every time we read an email, the file
changes to update the status of that email, the same if we
delete the email or move it to another folder. Every time
we create an email, the file changes with each automatic backup
of the email draft, and again when we send it. Every time
email comes in from the internet, the file again changes.
In my case, I check for
email every 7 minutes, so at an absolute bare minimum, my PST
file changes ten times every hour. And my PST file is
1.5GB in size. Few of us have the data bandwidth to be
able to upload 15GB of data every hour (in addition to all our
other internet usage requirements) - that would require about 37
Mbit/sec of uploading bandwidth just for the PST file alone.
A T1 line offers 1.54 Mbit/sec of bandwidth - you'd need 25 T1
lines, all working at maximum capacity, just to handle this
alone!
Sugar Synch's developers
advise they are working on a solution to this limitation, which
has been one of the most sought after enhancements to date.
This will probably involve some type of 'intelligence' on your
machine that will detect which parts of your PST file have
changed and only send the changed information to and fro - this
would make bandwidth requirements very much more practical, but
apparently will require some clever programming to implement.
Part 1 of a two part
series on Sugar Synch and other types of backup and
synchronization software - please
also visit
1.
An introduction to synchronization
software and to Sugar Synch
2.
Other considerations, pricing, and competitors
Related Articles, etc
|
If so, please donate to keep the website free and fund the addition of more articles like this. Any help is most appreciated - simply click below to securely send a contribution through a credit card and Paypal.
|
Originally published
25 July 2008, last update
21 Jul 2020
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.
|
Search 
