I had a very non-technical user who asked me to setup her new laptop, and to “make it sync” with the main PC.

She needed to update 1 or 2 excel files on the laptop while away from the office.

Teaching her how to use a usb drive, and how to copy files using windows explorer was not an option, so I had to invent something more foolproof (but without using a router… customer “might” look into buying a router at a later date).

In the past, I’ve used syncback for many backup and synchronising tasks, and it works very well.

So I did something similar:

• Setup syncback to synchronise the contends of a folder (folder is on the desktop, and on the usb drive).
• I do this on both the PC and the laptop.
• I setup syncback to do this every 2 minutes

I test it out, and it works well (I get syncback to quietly ignore errors when the usb drive is “not there”)

I then write detailed instructions on how to do this (particularly on how to safely remove a usb drive).

A wireless link would be ideal (no usb shuffling), and might still happen at some point (I hope!).