I was searching for some good online backup solutions to store my documents, ever since I found that DocSyncer was dead. I came across a wonderful service called DropBox, which I am currently testing to find out whether it will suit my requirements or not.
DropBox is currently in private beta and I have some invites left. If you need an invite just drop a comment here with your email address. Thanks Jigar for the invites.
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged DocSyncer, Dropbox, Invites 18 Comments
DocSyncer, the service that allowed users to sync their documents with Google Docs have shut down their doors since they couldn’t find a viable business model.
The way in which they have shut down has shocked me more than the fact that they have shut down the service. 🙁
Don’t get me wrong. I am not here to criticize or accuse them for shutting down. After all they were still in beta, (which means, use at your own risk). But I was rather annoyed that they didn’t even bother to send an email to the users, so that they can be prepared. It seems that they have posted a message in their website, but the users will visit the website only when they have to recover some documents which were already synced. The majority of the work was done by the desktop client and it is still running in my system tray, without giving any clue that the service was already shutdown.
I was one of the early adopters of the service and was so pleased with the service that I even wrote some tutorials about it. I have some critical documents which I update on daily basics. I wanted a simple solution to backup these documents and retrieve them based on date. DocSyncer was the perfect solution for me. I installed and pointed it to the directory in which I kept these documents and the client automatically backed up the documents to my Google Docs account.
A couple of day’s back I wanted to retrieve the document and tried to access the DocSyncer website but found that it was down. After a quick search in Google, I found that DocSyncer was dead. Last time I received an email from them was on April 22nd, when they announced pro account. This is not the first time I was affected because a service which I was using shutdown its doors, but I would have really appreciated if they could have sent a simple email saying that the service is going to be shut down.
Anyways, thank you Cliff Shaw and DocSyncer team for an excellent service which I was using for the past couple of months and my best wishes for your next startup.
If anyone from DocSyncer is reading this, then can you please let me know whether it is possible to opensource DocSyncer, at least the client alone? 😉
Meanwhile my search for an online backup system continues and I am planning to have a look at Windows Mesh and Dropbox. If anyone knows a better solution, then do let me know.
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged backup, DocSyncer, Dropbox, Google Docs 3 Comments
Recently, when I showed you how to automatically backup documents to Google Docs using DocSyncer, I mentioned that it is not possible to backup the documents to your Google Apps account. But today DocSyncer have released an update and now it is possible to backup the documents to your Google Apps account.
You have to go to the Account settings tab and then click disconnect and then connect again. You will be taken to a page where you can select either Google Apps account or standard Gmail account.
This is very useful to me, since I have started to use my Google Apps account instead of the standard Gmail account. Good job DocSyncer!
Posted in Google/Yahoo Tagged backup, DocSyncer, Google Apps, Google Docs 2 Comments
I was looking for a way to automatically backup my documents in Google Docs from my desktop. After a bit of googling, I found a great service called DocSyncer which worked exactly the same way I wanted it to work. So I thought of sharing the steps which I followed to back up my documents from desktop to Google Docs.
First sign up for the service from its home page.
Then allow DocSyncer access to your Google Docs, by clicking “Grant Access” in the next screen
After this download and install the DocSyncer program from the next screen
By default DocSyncer syncs all documents which are present in your desktop and in your Documents folder. I wanted only a few documents to be synced, so I created a new folder called InSync in my Documents folder and selected only that folder and unchecked all the other folders. If you want to sync all the documents which are present in your Documents folder then you don’t need to edit anything.
That’s it and now all the documents present in the folder that you have selected will be automatically synced. You can download the current version or the previous version of the document from the web interface.
You can also directly download the document from the Google Docs page.
You can also associate document files (.doc, .ppt, .xls etc) with DocSyncer so that they are automatically opened in Google Docs instead of opening them from the local desktop. This can be done by changing the file association from the Account Setting tab of the web interface.
I am using DocSyncer for the past one week and these are my findings based on my experience in the past week.
Posted in Google/Yahoo Tagged backup, DocSyncer, Google Apps, Google Docs 2 Comments