Keep everything in sync with Windows Vista's Sync Center

Microsoft has endowed Windows Vista with a new tool called Sync Center which is designed to work as a centralized location for all of your synchronization operations.

This gallery is also available as Greg Shultz's article, Keep everything in sync with Windows Vista's Sync Center.

If you have files stored on two computers or on a computer and mobile devices that you need to keep synchronized, then you know how frustrating it can be to have to use several different software packages with different user interfaces for each of your synchronization operations.

Fortunately, Microsoft realizes that there is a much stronger emphasis on synchronization. They've endowed Windows Vista with a new tool called Sync Center which is designed to work as a centralized location for all of your synchronization operations.

A little sync background

You may not realize it, but Microsoft actually has a lot experience in the syncing business--going all the way back to Windows 95. In that operating system, Microsoft introduced an elementary, but effective, synchronization tool called Briefcase, which was represented by an icon that lived on the desktop.

Back then, the most common way of using Briefcase was via a floppy disk. In this scenario, you'd drag and drop the files that you wanted to keep synchronized onto the Briefcase icon. You'd then drag and drop the Briefcase icon onto the floppy disk icon in My Computer. You could then take the floppy disk to another computer and then edit the files in the Briefcase folder on the floppy disk. When you later brought the floppy disk back to the original source computer, you'd double-click the Briefcase icon on the desktop and select the Update All command and Briefcase would synchronize the copies on the floppy disk with original files.

When we got to Windows XP, Briefcase was replaced by the more sophisticated Offline Files tool. Of course, by this time networks were more common and Offline Files was designed to use Ethernet rather than a floppy disk as the medium for synchronization.

Within the last year, August 2005 to be exact, Microsoft released a much more powerful synchronization tool called SyncToy. The nicest thing about SyncToy is that while it offers all kinds of sophisticated methods of synchronizing files, its user interface is extremely clean, making this tool very easy to use.