Two years ago, I started migrating my data into the “cloud” This is basically because I needed a way to access my more pertinent and volatile data from multiple machines without having to manually trigger a synchronization ¹ Not to mention that with my iPhone and iPod Touch, they really just sync with one device they have been paired with

Yes, I’m aware of the “security risks,” but I’ve weighed the security vs. practicality angles – and practicality came out on top given the data I had available.

Anyways, the “services” I had been using before were relatively new(ly developed), and had their share of “drawbacks.”

For example, MobileMe was probably the best solution as it could’ve given exactly what I needed right out of the gate, but it wasn’t worth it’s price tag IMHO ² When Apple decides to put it to like 30USD annually, then I’ll reconsider

Anyways, I “re-evaluated” my “process” this year and found a bunch of pleasant surprises!

Recap

So to jog you’re memory (assuming you didn’t read the link to the old post), the following “data” I would want to keep synchronized are:

1. Addressbook
2. Passwords
3. Calendar
4. Mail
5. ToDo list
6. Firefox bookmarks ³ Because I don’t like using Safari – I need my productivity add-ons

There are more listed in the old post, but a bunch of those have been dealt with ⁴ By the way, this link is older than the previous one mentioned and aren’t necessarily “critical” data.

Still the same

Most of which are still the same from the last time. That is to say that Firefox still is synced via FoxMarks, Mail is still synced with Google via IMAP, local software databases (iTunes, Adium, etc) are still synced with my Dropbox/SymLink method, Todo is still done via ToodleDo, etc.

Primer

But there have been changes in the past year(s) which I never got to discuss – maybe because they still had some limitation which I just decided to put up with.

Basically, Google has got a service called GoogleSync – which, in a nutshell, tries to give what MobileMe gives… free of charge. But of course the time I blogged about using it, it was more of a kludge than anything else.

It had calendaring support, but I used to just be able to subscribe to my calendars in read-only mode. ⁵ I had to work around it by using ToodleDo – which can enter new calendar events via Google’s API It could sync the address book to mobile devices, but not with the OS X address book (even if the latter had a setting to sync with it). It still doesn’t support tasks syncing to this day – or if it does, you’re still better off using other free services like ToodleDo.

Basically, the only thing I got to sync really well from the cloud to my multiple devices was my Mail (thanks to IMAP). The rest were a bit lacking… until now.

Changes

GoogleSync has matured a bit since then. And now has full calendaring support via CalDav protocol (same thing Apple uses) – so now I can read and write calendar events from all of my devices (wether mobile iCal, or desktop iCal) so officially, the calendar functionality is solved – just like with mail.

And yesterday, for the heck of it, I tried revisiting the address book “bug/issue” and found out that it now syncs to the desktop remotely as well! Remember, the sync I’m after is not when you plug the iPhone/iPod in. I want to be able to do the syncing wirelessly/automatically wherever I am or what machine I’m using – that only used to be possible with the iPhone/iPod touch, but now it works with the desktop as well.

It’s not without bugs though. For one it behaves differently depending on the software accessing it.

For example, I have Snow Leopard on my Laptop, and a Hackintosh Leopard install (kinda lazy to upgrade) on my desktop PC. Consider these screenshots:

So from the desktop (first picture) you can see that in the second monitor it shows how many Google address book contacts I have (All contacts). And the desktop address book syncs all of those, whereas on the laptop, it only takes the contacts I’ve elected to sync to my mobile devices (My Contacts)

Then, for some reason, on Leopard, I have to enable both Exchange and Google synchronization for it to even work. Snow Leopard doesn’t have this issue since it has no option to sync via Exchange.

There’s also a bug that affects both desktop and laptop; Google’s address book is very limited in the “fields” they synchronize. That means you have to pay attention how you add new contacts. You cannot just add custom fields since Google will either disregard them, or re-map them to fields you wouldn’t expect. And some supported fields (e.g. birthdays) aren’t synced (but are retained in the main Google database)

But all in all, as far as the “usefulness” of the service is, I personally think the benefits still outweigh the drawbacks – we can’t have it all… and who knows, maybe they can get it fixed in the future. After all, GoogleSync has much improved since the time I first used it. I’m very hopeful 🙂

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So all that’s really left is ToDos! But GoogleTasks is far from being mature, it simply lacks too much features found on “typical” ToDo services/applications for it to be worth using over what’s already out there. But again, I’m hopeful, once they get to focus on developing the task protocol then I’ll check it out again.

Assuming that they do get that fixed as well, then we will truly have a free MobileMe alternative. The advantage of MobileMe for now is how well it works – but I’m hopeful that in time, Google can come up with an offer that’s just as reliable… and more importantly, free!