An age-old problem in the computer world is backup and data accessability.  For years IT people have wanted a solution to get documents easily backed up and even better, syncronized to computers despite being on the same LAN (think small business network). There have been a few software solutions the last couple years but bandwidth limitations made us drag our feet to get in the game.

I want to sync a few gigabytes of data, and I thought that would be unrealistic a few years ago - today however, it works really well.

I was an early adopter of mesh.com - a Microsoft product - but it limited a folder to 5000 files, which could be easily a limit you'll reach if you extract the wrong type of zip into that folder.. and your syncing would stop.  We never got excited about that product, but lightly used it.

Then they forced us to live sync, same limitation, a little better interface - now back to live mesh.  Live mesh seems to have the same limitation, but this time you will be able to buy space (in the future, not today..).  This is a free product that gives you 5GB of space.  Pretty handy..

Until you try dropbox.  DropBox will give you 2GB free, has a lighter interface, doesn't kill your computer to run, and every friend you share the link with they give you another 250MB of free space.

Click here to get your free account: www.dropbox.com

You can easily use the 2GB for just the important folders you want to sync and get away with the free account - we're using the free account for now.

You can download the android and iPhone apps and view some of your files on your phone - and easily sync to multiple types of operating systems.

What we have seen in most small offices we visit - is that if there is a shared drive, it's usually less than 10GB - and of that, less than 500MB is usually the important stuff.  Your spreadsheets, word templates, custom forms, etc.

To summarize:  The current free software offerings that are out there are going to help a large percentage of users with their file syncing needs.  Of course this won't do large photo or music libraries well, but your important documents should be fine.

To get your photo libraries backed up online check out our online databackup service : http://drpcfix.com/services/data-backup.html