Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better

Chapter 11. Manage Multiple Computers

You use more computers on a regular basis than any previous generation did. You've got your computer at work, your PC at home, your spouse's laptop, and the family Mac to take care of, and getting simple tasks done between them can be tedious. If you tend to work between several computers, you should know about several utilities already built into your operating system or available for free that can make sharing information and resources easy.

Using multiple computers lets you get online and work on files from lots of different locations, but with that capability come complications — such as your work getting out of sync. If you bookmark a web site at the office, it won't be there when you get to your home computer. If you bring work home from the office and you forget your updated files there, you're up a creek. If your spouse downloads photos from the digital camera onto her laptop, you don't get to see them — unless you've got the right setup.

Personal computers once amounted to giant, stand-alone calculators until someone came up with the idea of connecting them to exchange information. All the computers in your life are connected in some way, whether on your home network or over the Internet, and that means you can do a lot more with them, such as share disks and devices and even automatically sync files between them. This chapter covers several techniques for synchronizing files and bookmarks between computers over the Internet and on the ...