For someone who has his work splashed over different com¬puters, tracking changes or moving files from one PC to another can be ratb,er cumbersome. Coupled with the Internet and some good old ingenuity, there is a clever fix to this frustrating dilemma - syncing software. One that caught my attention is Dropbox, which proclaims "Store, Sync and Share, your files online" and does that with minimum fuss.

Install the Dropbox software from the DVD, and register an account to get started. Also install it on PCs that need to be synced. In each case, you have to assign a folder, My Dropbox, that shall contain the files you need to share and sync across
multiple computers through the Internet. Once installed, it runs unobtrusively from the taskbar, and everything just works out of the box.

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I was shuffiing files between my office PC (Windows Vista) and laptop (Windows XP), and Dropbox synced them effortlessly. You get an instant notification through the taskbar icon of any activity in the shared folder. The only bottleneck for slow file sync is your Net connection or huge files, or both. Every action taken within the Dropbox folder on one PC is replicated across others linked by the same account. For example, whether you drag-n-drop files 'in the My Dropbox folder on your laptop, or delete files from a My Dropbox folder on another PC, after syncing, both folders will reflect the same number of files. And in case you accidentally delete an important file, you can restore it by logging onto the website.

For a free account you get 2GB of space. All data transfer between computers is secure (over SSL) and encrypted before storage on the server. The website has other features like downloading files, uploading into your synced folders, checking ACCOUNT on the Drop- update history of a particular file, sharing download and upload files through URL for files remotely over the non-Drop box users, and restoring files.