The Humble Microsoft Briefcase

I’ve just spent over an hour tearing my hair out, all for no reason.

One of the aims of an anchored author is to take as much of the real job to the day job each day, in order to write whenever time and bosses will allow: lunchtimes, coffee breaks, commuting, etc.    I used to manage that by using a Palm Lifedrive, which also acted as a USB drive.  The best feature was the File Manager, which kept the directories I requested synched perfectly.

When my computer imploded a few weeks ago, I was forced to…well, I hesitate to call it an upgrade, but I was forced to move to the Palm T/X, which is good enough for digital information from Outlook, but absolutely useless for keeping files synched, if I want to use them on a second computer, or have a lot of files I want to cart around with me (I do both).  Documents to Go is a poor file manager, can’t handle sub-folders…it just ain’t the File Manager on the LifeDive that I knew and loved.

So for the last few weeks, I’ve been juggling files on the Palm and on a USB thumbdrive.  Each time I got home, I had to remember which files on the thumbdrive had been changed, which was a friggin’ pain in the rear.  Today I lost a file, and my lunchbreak’s worth of new manuscript.

Enough is enough.

I quickly discovered that Windows Vista has this neat sub-program, the Sync Center, that is designed to do exactly what I wanted: keep multiple directories synched between a USB drive and the computer.  Except for one snag:  It keeps wanting to sync my USB drive with Windows Media Player, and no options to change the default sync program.  Help guides, FAQs and on-line help didn’t help.  I found the Microsoft forum where others had the same problem, but no-one on the forum offered a solution other than downloading another sync program and trying that.  (I did.  It sucked.  I’ve uninstalled it.)

Then I literally tripped over Microsoft’s Briefcase feature.

This little program has been around since, oh, about Microsoft 2000 or perhaps even ‘95.  It’s that old.  I remember using it in Australia, and I’ve been in Canada for eleven years.

Briefcase is basically the same principal as the Sync Center.  You create a briefcase on your removable media, and dump all the directories and files you want to keep synched into the briefcase.  When you come back to your computer, you tell the Briefcase to update itself.  It does a comparison, tells you what files need to be updated, you agree (and get to sort out discrepencies), and off it goes and updates everything.

It’s a little slow and clunky, but I’ll put up with it for now.  The program is a decade old after all — and they haven’t even updated the icon.  And besides, it works.

Does anyone know how to get around the Sync Centre insistence that a USB only sync with Windows Media Player?  I’ve tried it all…

First appeared on Anchored Authors on May 20, 2008

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.