Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

Review: SyncMate

Review: SyncMate

When you absolutely need to synchronise your Mac with everything everywhere

Having access to all your important data on all your computers and devices is becoming increasingly important to pretty much everyone.

SyncMate 2.4 comes in both a free and an expert edition, and offers data synchronisation with a range of devices and services, including Macs, PCs, Windows Mobile or Nokia S40 phones, Google (including ‘Android’ phones), Sony PSPs and USB flash drives. The free edition will sync only contact and calendar information, as well as certain system preferences and SMS messages from supported phones; the expert edition will also sync iPhoto, iTunes, Safari, Firefox, folders and Mail messages. Both editions also offer online storage for storing data and settings.

To use it, launch it, tell it what kind of connections you’d like to set up, then decide whether to merge or overwrite data. If you want to sync with a Mac, install SyncMate on it; with a PC, install the SyncMate Windows module.

Although the interface is a little aesthetically challenged and typo-ridden, it’s still easy to use. Unfortunately, although the program does do a very good job of synchronising most data, we found that there were some glitches: times on some Google Calendar events would be incorrect or on the wrong days altogether, for example.

Anything less than 100% reliable synchronisation makes such software potentially dangerous, so we wouldn’t recommend using SyncMate without making backups and experimenting first to see how well it works with your set-up. However, it has the potential when it works to be a premier tool for data synchronisation.

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