Personal Data Portability

Note: I’m still working on this article, but I thought it made sense to publish for the folks who find the existing information useful. There’s an abundance of background material here that you can scan past—I’m just trying to establish a scenario that might be very familiar to some Mac/PC crossover users out there who feel the pain.

Syncing Data Over the Web – Desperate for a Solution?
I have to believe there is a niche of people out there like myself, who fall into the confounded category of “savvy enough with technology to want a web-services based solution for porting email, calendars, tasks and contacts between different computers” but who are also “not savvy enough to know precisely what tools they should use to do this seamlessly between different kinds of hardware in different locations, with different operating systems, and disparate mail/calendar/contact/task software clients.”

That’s a mouthful. Allow me to describe the problem a different way.

I have two Macs at home. One sits in my home office with a thousand cords plugged into it. It’s the better of the two computers but, although it’s a laptop, it’s tied down by wiring that is just too much of a hassle to unplug and re-plug every time I want to satisfy a random curiosity on Wikipedia and I’m in another room. The other computer sits on the bar that separates my kitchen from my living room. It’s small, dinged up a little, but it’s always in the right place a the right time, with nothing tying it down except a small power cord. At work, I typically use a PC. Windows XP Pro, MS Office, the normal deal. Oh yeah, and for a while my work had issued me a BlackBerry, which I used reluctantly while my iPhone slept in my pocket. That’s a lot of devices to keep in sync. What happened to the promise of Web 2.0, APIs, and convergence? Forget tweeting—I just want to send a recurring event to a colleague from my mac at home before I rush out the door for work, and rest assured that it will be waiting for me in my calendar on my PC when I arrive—with all of the necessary details I put into the request in the first place. Is platform independent, 2-way calendar syncing using a free web service too much to ask for?

Until recently, I had thought so. Enter Google.

Mail
Summary: This is easy. It took me far too long to discover the merits of IMAP, having been a thoughtless POP user for years. But the first time I experienced Microsoft Exhange I thought “Wow. This is amazing. I wish someone made something like MS Exchange for the open source community.” Months later I realized they already do—and have offered Exchange-like functionality for non-MS clients for quite some time now. It’s called IMAP, it’s a communications/storage/retreival protocol, it’s a standard service from many basic web hosting & email packages, and it will save your inbox.

Hub: Gmail

Spokes: Mac Mail, MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird

Plugins needed: None

Configuration needed: IMAP

Setup: The method is simple. Create a gmail account, whether you intend to ultimately use the address from which to send email. If you want to send/receive emails from a different address, you must first setup Gmail to get mail from another account using it’s POP3 credentials from the Gmail Settings -> Accounts screen.

Next, whether your grabbing mail from another account or not at this point enable IMAP from the Gmail Settings -> Forwarding POP/IMAP screen. This will allow your mail client(s) to check message but leave the original copies on the server, including the flagged status, the read/unread status, and the deleted status among other things.

Finally, set up the mail client on your computer or mobile device using the necessary IMAP settings and credentials associated with your Gmail account

An excellent free solution for folks who check email often on their mobile phone, and want their home or work email accounts to sync which emails have been read.

Calendar
Summary: This solution took a considerably more trial and error. Three years more. Here’s a quick recap of where I’ve been before I got here:

1. I didn’t use a calendar at all

2. I got a job and found out about this thing called Outlook. You could send and receive invitations to events using a branch of what I thought was just a simple email program.

3. I got another job where the company used an Exchange server, and discovered the beauty of 2-way-syncing your email and your calendar from a mobile device, to a server, and back down to your work computer. Genius!

4. I searched high and low for a similar offering I could take advantage of using my Mac at home. This was before the days of “Mobile Me”, an Exchange-like web-based service offered by Apple.

5. I decided “To heck with both proprietary platforms, I’m going to use Google Calendar exclusively through my web browser”. Three problems with this: a) Doesn’t work offline (it didn’t at the time at least) b) it was ugly, clunky and didn’t mesh well with my other productivity applications—required all sort of customizations and c) did I mention it required a change in my personal computing habits? I learned a quick lesson: there is no such thing as changing personal computing habits. They are immutable.

6. I attempted to bridge the gap by paying for a utility for Mac called “Spanning Sync” that syncs your iCal calendar to Google Calendar. This is decent for Mac (though notably buggy), but now I was compromising on the PC front.

7. Just as I was about to give up completely, I recalled Mozilla. That old soldier. They had a calendar client with versions for both PC and Mac, right? Maybe in the past couple years since I last checked some developer had come up with a plugin or something that allowed syncing with Google calendar. Imagine the trifecta: Mac, PC, Google—all playing nicely with each other and resulting in a truly portable, cross-platform solution that didn’t involve any cost at all.

8. Big bucks, no whammies, stop… Jackpot.

Hub: Google Calendar

Spokes:
1. iCal
2. Mozilla Sunbird
3. iPhone

Plugins needed:
1. For iCal: Calaboration
2. For Sunbird: Provider
3. For iPhone: Nuevasync

Configuration needed: Create 2-way sync between desktop and mobile clients using Google Calendar as your hub.

Setup: TBD

Contacts

Hub: Google Contacts

Spokes:
1. AddressBook
2. Mozilla Thunderbird

Plugins needed:
1. ?
2. For Thunderbird: Contacts

Bookmarks

Hub: Foxmarks.com

Spokes: Web browser

Plugins needed: Foxmarks

Tasks

Hub: Remember the Milk

Spokes:

1. Web browser
2. Mobile phone (phone-specific apps require paid subscription, however a mobile browser does not)

Plugins needed: An addon for Firefox exists that allows you to integrate RTM into your Gmail as a new pane.

Active Files

Hub: Dropbox

Spokes:
1. Your personal computer
2. Any computer connected to the internet

Plugins needed: None