Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with synchronise

Movie in which thieves sync their heist with songs?

oxit — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:13:06 -0800

What's that movie in which two male thieves synchronise the timing of their heist by whistling jazz songs? I've seen it probably in the eighties, the jazz songs most probably where swing standards and the whistling might have been singing or even humming. Still I think the respectives parts of the movie where accompanied with the real music, played by a band.

Unfortunately search engines and movie database's similarity features didn't help. Thanks for letting me tap your memorisation.

How do I properly sync Outlook with Google?

mr_silver — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:58:51 -0800

I'm trying to find a way to synchronize Outlook Calendar (on Windows) with Google Calendar that actually works - as my current solution doesn't. Bonus points if I can sync contacts as well. I want to synchronize Outlook with Google and then use Google's Exchange support so that I can get this information on whatever phone I'm using at the time.

At present I use Google Calendar Sync and a periodic export and import of a CSV containing my contacts.

This sucks for several reasons but the main one is that the Google application is buggy and has a habit of randomly deleting appointments. This is a well known bug and no fix seems to be coming any time soon. It's happened enough times for me to want to get away from the application.

The second major one is that exporting a CSV from Outlook and then importing it into Google isn't really syncing, a pain in the backside and prevents me from making any changes on the go because they'll just get lost.

I've done a search on the internet and there seems to be quite a few options - none of which appear to be free and several of which that want you to pay a monthly fee.

So, my question is - can you recommend any Windows applications which are free and sync calendar and contacts with Google?

peer to peer folder sync

matholio — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:12:10 -0800

Can anyone recommend software to syncronise files between multiple servers ? I have staff creating multiple large files, >1gb, daily and I need to share them with multiple organisations. (medical research data, medical research institutes, univercities, etc)

I'm considering using bittorrent and handrolling a solution.
Scan a folder for new files, auto seed new files, check other servers for their new autoseeded files.

When staff want to commit a data file for synching, they would just move it to a specific folder and wait for the servers to sync overnight.
An enhancement would be a webpage for staff to tick boxes, to publish data, queue for syncing, etc.

As far as I knopw the data will be static, once it's created it won't change, there will just be more of it.

It would be nice to have some reporting functions too.
Platform would be windows or linux.
Encryption during transit would be nice.
Estimated new data is 15gb day.
Initial seed would be 1,000gb+ (may post harddisks to start off)
Server locations are global.
Bandwidth not a huge problem, academic networks will be used.(keen to be efficient though)

If there is a existing solution, I'd like to hear about it.

I considered PowerFolder, but the techs there say it doesn't doesn't support multiple sources. I'm really looking for something that support multiple sources at a block level.

If there's an obvious way to do this, I'm missing it.
I'll admit I like the idea of using bittorent for legitimate purposes, but that should not be the driver.

Copying files - duplicate filnames

Busy Old Fool — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 04:30:41 -0800

I want to copy files, ignoring & logging it if the target directory contains files with the same name. (Ubuntu 7.04) I have a large number of CD-Rs & DVD-Rs containing files (mostly mp3s, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to the problem at hand) organised which I would like to copy to my hard disk, on a Ubuntu 7.04 system.

For each disc, I want to issue a single command (via command line or GUI, it doesn't matter) and have all the files recursively copied to the hard disk, retaining the directory structure. If a file with the same name already exists in the same directory in the target filesystem I would like it to be skipped and for this to be logged. I don't want the copying process to be interrupted with overwrite/ignore-type messages.

Ideally, the identical filename situation would *not* be logged if the files were also identical in size (or even better, if they had the same hash). Also in a perfect world, the log would contain not only the names of skipped files, but also their size.

The --update argument to cp automates the 'identical filename' issue, but it is concerned with whether one file is more recent than another and that is not important to me.

I've looked at Unison File Synchronizer, but can't see a way to get it to do what I want.

Thanks!

How to synchronise bookmarks between admin-locked PC and mac?

spiff101 — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:54:23 -0800

How can I synchronise bookmarks between my work PC (admin-locked, no installations possible) and home MacBook - is portable Firefox the answer? At work, I use a PC for which I do not have admin privileges - so I can't install anything on it. As a result, I use IE. At home, I use a MacBook with Firefox.

I'd like to painlessly synchronise the bookmarks I use on these two machines - ie, add a bookmark quickly to either machine and have it show up on the other machine, without constantly importing and exporting files.

I want to use something that sits in the sidebar - del.icio.us and other search-dependent web apps just aren't quick enough for me.

The only thing I can think of is using portable firefox from a flash drive at work, and the bookmarks sync extension.

However, I don't have any web-space or FTP server.

Also, does portable Firefox use on a daily basis wear out a flash drive quickly? And is it unsafe to have my passwords remembered by Firefox there?

Backup and sync software for OSX

ascullion — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 09:17:39 -0800

Does anyone know of a good, reliable free/shareware OS X app that can do simple backup/synchronise operations. Something like Syncback on windows. Thanks.

Multiple PCs

mattr — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 07:20:30 -0800

I use a whole bunch of PC's - three mainly, my laptop at work, and a desktop and laptop at home...I'd like to find a way of keeping my favorites synchronised on all three OR keeping them all in one place on the web and being able to access them...oh, and I'd like the solution to be 'free' and look cool...(is there an easy way to harvest the 500 favorites on my work laptop - and turn them into a web page?)

I use IE6 on all of my PC's....but some web based solution would allow me to access all my links from other machines/browsers.