Tag Archives: sync

Google Drive is finally here

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Google has finally released the Google Drive service. If you’re familiar with Dropbox, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Apple’s iCloud, etc, it’s the same thing. I’ve been using Dropbox for years and enjoy it a lot. The free service gives you 2GB and you can upgrade it with a paid subscription. There are already many advantages for me to switching to Google Drive:

  1. I already use many Google services and they are all integrated.
  2. I already have a Google account so I don’t have to sign up for another new account.
  3. Many of my friend’s already have a Google account so it makes sharing easier.
  4. You get 5GB for free. I know Microsoft and Apple start you off with 5GB+ but Gmail has always been friendly with all operating systems – which is another advantage.
  5. Cost. For $2.49/month you get 25GB of storage. You can quadruple that and only pay twice that per month at $5. I may save more money versus using Amazon’s S3 service.

As I mentioned above, I’m currently using Amazon’s S3 service to back up my photos in the cloud. I’m currently paying around $3-4 per month. It’s a nice service and it’s a pay for what you use service. Not only am I paying for the storage that I use, I also pay for the bandwidth and server requests as well. That, I didn’t like. So far, it looks like storage is all I pay for with Google Drive. I may make the switch after I do some testing.

Sync calendars, the free and easy way

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I’ve been trying to figure out how I can sync my calendars on to more than one machine. Since switching to a Mac a couple of years ago, I’ve been using iCal. What I hate though is having to pay for a .Mac account (now know as Mobile Me) every year. It’s $100 annually but the only feature I use is the calendar and contact syncing. I already have my own website so I don’t need that from the service.

So I started to use Google calendar a couple of years ago to avoid having to pay for Apple’s service. It works perfect! I can be on any computer with an internet connection and have access to my calendar. I recently found an app that Mozilla created that does calendar management – Sunbird. It’s been out for awhile but an add-on was recently created that “Allows bidirectional access to Google Calendar”. Great! It makes my solution of using Google calendar easier. With this add-on, you can now connect to your Google calendars and have full access. Prior to this, you only had read-only access (which my iCal currently is doing :( ).

So now I can use Sunbird to fully manage my Google calendars without having to use my browser. Then my iCal will continue to do it’s one-way sync from Google, then syncs with my iPhone.

Now the only thing that’s left is my Address Book.

New Address Book sync options in 10.5.3

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Apple recently released 10.5.3 update for Leopard. One of the updates I’m excited about is the ability to sync Address Book with Google and Yahoo!. If you want to set up a sync with Yahoo!, view this page http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/addressbook/autosync/autosync-20.html. For Google, visit this page http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/05/mac-os-x-1053-sync-google-contacts.html. The only problem I found so far is with Google and contacts that have “Company” checked on your Address Book. These contacts seem to show up as blank in the contacts list (http://www.google.com/support/contactsync/#anchor_link_9). But if you click on it in Gmail, it will display the information.