OK, OK, I’m taking the Fujitsu P1610
No more agonizing about what to take to Vegas, I’m taking the P1610 for its svelte form and dependable work ethic. You could probably tell I was going to go that way but the synchronization thing did give me pause. What I decided to do is go back to a manual sync routine I’ve used in the past and use Karen’s Replicator to copy all of my stuff from the HP 2710p to an external hard drive. I then synced that over to the Fujitsu to make sure my current data will go with me to Vegas. That only took a few minutes but the process is far from over.
There are two main reasons why I dislike this manual sync routine so much, not the amount of effort as it’s actually small. No, the two reasons can really impact me a great deal so I’ll explain. First and foremost, I depend on the ability to search my stuff in the blink of an eye. I can do it on Vista with its integrated search ability and I can do it on XP having installed Windows Desktop Search. I search constantly for emails in Outlook, inked notes in OneNote as well as key phrases in Office documents. Both of these search methods serve me well and I can’t live without them. Unfortunately, this manual sync method causes a massive search indexing to take place on the Fujitsu P1610 (XP) because the search index sees the file dates as changed. No big deal but the indexing has been going on for an hour and still has probably another hour to go to completion. It doesn’t require any action on my part as it works fine on its own but I just have to wait until its done to really use the device. This index process will be repeated when I return and sync my files back over to the HP.
A lot of you had some good suggestions to get FolderShare back to working by creating similar Document file structures on both devices. I can’t do that because of the way I use OneNote. I embed links to documents in note pages all the time. As an example someone will send me a Project Gantt chart (MPP) file and I’ll embed the link in the status note page so I can just click it and open should the need arise. If I move or change my document tree structure there is a good likelihood that all of those links, and there are hundreds covering years of documents, will be broken. That just won’t work for me so that’s the reason I don’t just change my file structure to allow easy FolderShare syncing.
In any event I have manually synced my stuff so it’s off to Vegas tomorrow with Miyagi, the Fujitsu P1610. Wish me luck!
James I’m a bit confused. If you embed links in OneNote using the P1610 on XP, then those links wouldn’t work on the 2710p since it’s on Vista’s file structure right? Or does OneNote automatically redirect to the correct path in Vista? I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you don’t build the structure on the Fuji to match Vista’s, you would have a conflict with any links you create in Vista or when you try to open those links on the HP that were created on the Fuji. Wouldn’t you?
I don’t know if anyone else suggested this yet, but why not use NTFS’s version of soft/hard linking to duplicate both structures without moving anything? http://alax.info/blog/ntfslinks is the one I use when I’m on windows; it’s free, or you can do it without any utilities from the command line.
When I was using Vista, I was able to get at my documents folder from \Documents and Settings\myname\My Documents, \Users\myname\Documents, and \home\myname\documents (as someone who uses Linux the most, the last was the one I used most of the time.) It can confuse some scanning programs, but it makes syncing between different OSes easy — and some poorly-programmed older Windows machines work more nicely with that kind of setup anyway.
I think you need to step back and consider whether your current filing system is scalable for the long, long years to come.
My belief is that the use of computers leads us into all sorts of lazy habits and filing is probably the worst of these. Set up a standard filing system which will work irrespective of machine or o/s and then you will not need to concern yourself when the indexing system changes/freezes/locks out or whatever.
Better still keep all your files on a central repository and access them from there – in the new connected world I challenge you to reduce your “IP-footprint” in terms of data storage.