Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

One of the great advances in Web technology for the Desktop user has been the increase in complexity of Web applications.  It’s now possible to not only write your emails online, but use word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs, not to mention edit images, audio and even video, all within your web browser.  Google Docs is just one of a number of web office solutions, and while it isn’t as full-featured as a Desktop office suite like Microsoft Office, it has the advantage of being “installed” wherever you have a web browser and an Internet connection, is always up-to-date (the application as well as your documents), and works the same on Mac, Windows and Linux.

One of the major hassles with online document creation, of course, is that if your Internet connection goes down, or you find yourself away from home and without Internet access, then you can’t get to those documents, as they’re stored exclusively in the Web.  Google recently re-introduced offline access, but it doesn’t work in every web browser, so if you use Internet Explorer, for example, you’re stuck.

A perfect solution would be to have copies of your Google Docs documents on your computer, so you can work on them while you’re offline, then have those copies synchronized with the web copies, which would leave you – no matter where you are or what your Internet status – with up-to-date files.

Fortunately, a solution exists that solves this issue.  It’s a program that goes by the name Super Flexible File Synchronizer, and it is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.  The standard version for Mac and Windows sells for $34.95, while the profession sells for $59.95 (the Linux version is free).

Here’s how to install and configure it in Ubuntu, so all your Google Docs documents are synchronized between the cloud and your Desktop.

First, navigate to the Linux download page for Super Flexible File Synchronizer.

Now, simply scroll down to the Linux Version section, and download the Linux binary archive.

This is the 32-bit binary; for 64-bit systems, you will likely need to install the ia32-libs package (as it’s called in Ubuntu), and maybe the ia32-libs-gtk if necessary.

Once you’ve downloaded the archive (a .tar.gz file), extract it wherever you like.  Below, we’re extracting it to our Desktop, but we’ll likely move it elsewhere later.

As the download page says: “There are no special installation requirements. The unpacked download file should work out of the box.”  And that’s true.  Once we extracted the .tar.gz archive, we had a file named SuperFlexibleSynchronizer sitting on our Desktop.

All we had to do was double-click it, and it opened up to this window.

Since this is our first time using the program, we don’t have any saved profiles to run, nor do we have anything to schedule, so we’ll use the first option: Perform a synchronization or backup.  Simply click the large button.

Any synchronization needs two different folders; when one is updated, the other is synchronized to match it.  In a basic use case scenario, we could have one folder on our hard drive synchronizing with a folder on an external hard drive for easy file backup.  Since we want to use Google Docs as one of our sources, click the little globe icon to the right of either the Left-Hand Side or Right-Hand Side fields.

You’ll find the Google Docs option in the pop-up window (it should read FTP the first time you see this window).  Once you’ve chosen the Google Docs option, enter in your Google/Gmail username and password.

If you have a specific folder you’d like to synchronize, enter it in the Folder field, otherwise leave it blank to synchronize all your documents.

For a few more Google Docs options, click the Google Docs tab at the top of the window.

In this window, you’ll be able to specify which format certain document types take when synchronized locally, as well as which document types (if any) should be converted when uploaded.

Warning: although it is likely installed by default, if you have removed the libssl0.9.8 package, you will receive this warning.

This is a simple fix.  In Ubuntu, the package is named as mentioned above and can be installed with a simple command:

sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8

Once you’ve set up the Google Docs portion, simply select a folder on your hard drive that will be the local storage folder, then hit the Next button.

In our example, we set up Google Docs as the Left folder, with our Documents folder as the Right folder.  If we want synchronization to go both ways, make sure Left To Right and Right To Left are both checked.  If you only want one-way synchronization, select the proper option.  In addition, if you want only the base folder synchronized, click None, but if you want all subfolders synchronized as well, check All.

In Step 3, you’ll select Sync Mode Super Flexible File Synchronizer should use.  You have the option to use Standard Copying, which copies new, missing or modified files but doesn’t delete anything, or SmartTracking, which is the standard two-way synchronization mode, and should be configured to your tastes.  There is also an option for how deleted files should be treated.

In Step 4, you have the option to select which types of files will be synchronized, and which will be ignored.  By default, all file types are synchronized and none are excluded, but you can change that as you wish.

The next step gives you timer options, which allow you to set options such as scheduling a time to synchronize, starting the sync at computer startup, and more.

Finally, give your new profile a name.

From now on, when you choose to run your profile, you’ll see a window like this, which can be configured to show all documents, or only those with changes.

Click to start the synchronization and the following, smaller window will appear as your changes are reflected from folder to folder.

And that’s it!  You should now have a folder like this on your hard drive:

In it should be all the files you wanted kept up-to-date from your Google Docs account.  From now on, simply make changes locally or through the Google Docs interface, and either run Super Flexible File Synchronizer, or use the Scheduling option, and your changes will be visible, regardless of where the change was made.