Keeping laptop and desktop address books in sync

It drives me crazy having three address books, one on my desktop editing system, another on my MacBook Pro laptop, and a third on my old iBook laptop used to surf the web while watching the old media box. How can I keep three Macs synchronized? I’ve finally found a good way to do this after a harrowing journey.

So first I tried Apple’s 30-day trial of .Mac, lured by the promise of being able to not only keep my address books in sync, but I could access my addresses online as well. Well, my experience with that was not a good one, first of all I’m not keen on paying $99/year for the service and I also experienced having my desktop’s address book wiped out when I did the first synchronization (to be fair the online discussion on Apple’s boards helped me learn it was a bug in the version of Address Book I was using and there was a work-around to the problem).

Eventually I got the .Mac synching to work and I recovered the missing data, but wow, what a wild ride that was. And $99/year on top of that? Not a good deal. I already have a web server, online file storage, etc. I just needed synchronization. Then several months ago I came across a new application, SyncTogether from Mark/Space.

I’ve been using The Missing Sync for Palm OS (another Mark/Space application) for quite some time to synchronize my Address Book and Notes with my Palm Phone (no, I’m not getting an iPhone yet, that’s another story) and it’s worked well for me. So when I learned they had acquired a new synchronization application, my interest was piqued.

SyncTogether is a Mac to Mac synchronization tool that syncs contacts, calendars and Apple mail settings and filters between Macs on a network. I’ve been using it to keep my Address Book contacts between my laptop and desktop Macs in sync and so far I’m very happy with it. Installation is pretty simple and it works well.

You can also use SyncTogether to synchronize iCal calendars, Safari bookmarks, Apple Mail settings and filters, and even some third-party applications, but so far I’ve only been using it to keep the Address Books in sync. I’m told, however, that SyncTogether provides you many of the benefits of Calendar groupware so for a group of people using Macs, it could very well be an inexpensive way to keep calendars in sync, but I can’t really say much about it since I’ve not used that aspect of it.

Being able to use SyncTogether makes me very happy because I no longer need to remember to put all important changes into a single address book. Whether I’m traveling and using the laptop or working in my home office, my address books is now always up-to-date and instantly accessible. SyncTogether is sold as a $49.95 download and can be used to synchronize up to three Macs. Each additional license adds three more Macs. The Missing Sync for Palm is sold as a $39.95 download.