Syncing notes among various computers

[Dan Phillips]

Howdy boys.

Does anyone have a favorite, simple, free, fast way to keep notes up to date among various BW9-running computers?

My favorite BW feature is the ability to make notes on individual verses. But after a few years, that's become a lot of tiny little files. The only way I know to keep the files current on various pc's is to copy all those files to and from flash drives. But that's not fast nor fun.

Anyone know a better way?

[MGVH]

There are a number of cloud syncing services, but the easiest I've found for keeping all my BW notes synced is SugarSync. A big advantage it offers is that you can simply point it to existing folders on your devices. (Dropbox, GoogleDrive, and Box all make you set up a specific syncing folder which means you have to move your BW subdirectories, then go into BW and edit paths.) So, you can have it directly backup/sync your Notes subdirectory in BW. (I also have it backup my ASE and Timeline directories.) SugarSync comes free! with 5Gb, which is more than most other services, but I still do NOT recommend using it to sync your Databases subdirectory. That one can get quite large and there are path issues too. Similarly, I do NOT sync my Init subdirectory because it contains a lot of machine specific stuff.

Syncing is very fast and virtually unnoticeable in the background. I use it to backup a bunch of other directories. It's secure. It's cheap if you want to buy more than the 5Gb free. Your files can be accessed on the web, and they have apps for every mobile device. Even if you aren't needing to sync files, I still recommend this as a way to automatically backup files. It also works great for sharing large files, photos, and music. You can even stream your music to your mobile device.

If you want to try SugarSync, if you use THIS LINK, I get an extra 500Mb storage. Thanks!

[Dan Phillips]

Thanks very much, Dr. Mark. Yeah, even though I've been using BW for 47 years, I don't even know what ASE and Timeline directories are. All I care about are my notes on the verses, and that entire subdir is much less than 1 GB.

Their site doesn't explain much, so here's what I don't understand. Suppose I sign up here at work, and designate C:\Program Files (x86)\BibleWorks 9\notes as the subdir I want to back up. So it presumably uploads it off of this, my work pc at church. Then I go home and sign in to one of my laptops or my pc, and... what? How will that initial access not overwrite the correct version with that pc's older version? And then as I edit it, it will... automatically update the "cloud" version, so that the "cloud" version will automatically overwrite the work pc's version with those updates?

Any way of you walking me through that without losing your whole weekend to it?

[Nord Zootman]

Dan,

I use dropbox, but as Mark said, you have to designate your dropbox file folder as the location for your notes. It works very well and is easy to save other files to as well. Anything I put in my dropbox file on my desktop at church shows up automatically on my laptop at home. I have used it for a couple of years with no problems.

[Lee]

Howdy boys.

Does anyone have a favorite, simple, free, fast way to keep notes up to date among various BW9-running computers?

My favorite BW feature is the ability to make notes on individual verses. But after a few years, that's become a lot of tiny little files. The only way I know to keep the files current on various pc's is to copy all those files to and from flash drives. But that's not fast nor fun.

Anyone know a better way?

Are you saving your notes directly to your flash drive? If you do that, that's just as fast as any other solution. Whatever computer I'm working on, I just plug in my flash drive, and it reads the same notes directly from the flash drive and updates the same notes on the flash drive when I add or change something.

[MGVH]

Once you've installed SugarSync on one computer, you can start designating folders to sync. I find the easiest way is to use Explorer, right-click on a folder, and use the SugarSync menu option that indicates you want to sync the folder.
Once you install SugarSync on the other computer, you will be able to tell which folders are to be synced with each other.
SugarSync keeps track of things fairly well and tracks changes to files. It will save the newest version. The only issue would be if you update a file on both computers before syncing either. If I recall, it knew something was up and offered options on how to deal with it.
You can use the SugarSync File Manager shown below to manage things.

[MGVH]

I used to use a flash drive, but I always want more than one set, so I would use the normal BW Notes directory, then use a free folder syncing program (ViceVersa) and then repeat on the other computer. SugarSync is way easier...

[Lee]

I used to use a flash drive, but I always want more than one set, so I would use the normal BW Notes directory, then use a free folder syncing program (ViceVersa) and then repeat on the other computer. SugarSync is way easier...

I may be a dinosaur in this respect, but I do a whole lot of my work when I am offline. I would hate to depend upon having an Internet connection to access my notes.

[Michael Hanel]

I may be a dinosaur in this respect, but I do a whole lot of my work when I am offline. I would hate to depend upon having an Internet connection to access my notes.

If your computer(s) is (are) not regularly connected to the internet, I would say using a flash drive probably is a better approach, but if you are using computers that are connected to the internet, the cloud solution is by far the best. I used to carry my flash drive with me every time I was back and forth from home to school, but now Dropbox (or its equivalent) saves most of that hassle. To be sure, I wouldn't store stuff that I wouldn't care being seen by other eyes, but if someone wants to read my Bible notes, well more power to them.

[Ben Spackman]

I originally asked about this problem years ago between two pcs

I'm happy to say that Dropbox solves all my problems. Free 2Gb account, handles things between my Win7 Netbook, and Parallels/Xp on an IMac and Macbook Air with no problems. You don't have to think about it or worry about it, and you don't need internet access to use your notes, since they live on all your hard drives.

Here's a referral link, gets you a little extra space and me too. I've been using it for years and never paid a dime.
http://db.tt/fcvkxzT