One cumbersome digital experience some people have to deal with is to maintain files across multiple desktop platforms, especially if one of those is Linux.

Imagine this scenario: you have a Linux desktop in your home office and have just purchased a Mac for portability. You’ve transferred some of the important files you need from your desktop to your laptop so you can access and edit them remotely. You go out of town and bring your Mac with you so you can work on your personal projects. You’re settled in your workstation in a cafe, open your laptop and then realize that the file you needed was not in the files your transferred before you left. Your house is an hour flight away from your location.

If you were in this situation, what will you do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

External drives do help

Keeping a backup of your files in a thumb drive or an external drive helps a lot because you can bring these devices anywhere and everywhere. One problem with drives is that you will only have the version of the files when they were transferred, it does not not synchronize with any new versions, unless you save in the drive or copy the file over the old one. Another problem with external drives is that they can be lost or be compromised by malware or viruses, which can prove dangerous when you are handling sensitive files.

Cloud to the rescue

One way to keep everything in the devices you need is keeping them in the cloud -- that way all you’ll need to do is to login your drive and download any files that you’ll need. However, once you’ve edited the downloaded files in their native apps on your desktop, you’ll need to reupload them again to your cloud to make sure that you’ve got the latest version up in your drive.

In addition, cloud storage will not allow you to access your files using your machine-native apps and will usually only allow you to open and edit files that can be supported by their ecosystem. Offline options are only available once you authorise it per file, which can be a lot of grunt work if you have a huge number of files that need offline access or use.

Keeping it simple and synced

Syncing solves the one-sided storage that the cloud presents by making sure that the file you need is in its most updated version both in the cloud and your desktop, saving you the time and effort in constantly downloading and reuploading across all your machines. Investing in a sync client that works across multiple platforms and is compatible with several operating systems ensures that you spend more time working on the important things instead of the worrying about compatibility and constantly keeping your files updated.

How can Insync help?

Insync is a Google Drive syncing app client that works across multiple operating systems. We support Windows, Linux and macOS. You can install your client across multiple platforms and begin syncing. Once you select which items to sync from your Drive to your desktop, Insync will take care in making sure that the latest version -- whether edited from your drive or desktop -- will be synced and available across both platforms.

We’ve sent out surveys to our users, and have seen that access across multiple platforms/multiple operating systems is one of our most common use cases, so we definitely know that we can help you.

We have a 15-day free trial with unlimited platform installs per Google account, allowing you to test our suite of services, including multiple platform support and multiple account support :)

Try Insync