Some changes in the latest release of dropbox have created a lot of noise in the forums. The summary is that Apple have made some changes in their macOS that gives less flexibility to how Dropbox can operate, and Dropbox have made changes accordingly.
I have a list of contacts in a numbers document that contains their first name, last name, phone and email. This will also work for an excel file, or a CSV file. I wanted to import them into my Apple Contacts on my iPhone so I can email and ring them. This process was much more complex than I expected!
The first time you start up a new Apple computer it asks if you want to transfer data from another computer. If you select yes, it opens Migration assistant, and gives you the option to connect to another computer. There are various ways you can connect. Some are very slow! Some are fast.
The slowest is to use wifi. If you connect your computers using wifi it may take days (literally days) to transfer the data across.
A faster way is to connect the 2 computers using an ethernet cable. This is still fairly slow.
The fastest way is to use a thunderbolt USB-C cable to connect the 2 computers together.
I recently used Thunderbolt to connect my new MacBook Pro to my old Mac Mini and it reduced the transfer time from days to hours.
Ethernet can transfer at speeds up to 1Gbps.
Thunderbolt 3 can transfer at speeds up to 40Gbps. It’s 40 times faster!
This is what a Thunderbolt (USB-C) cable looks like:
You simply connect the thunderbolt port of one MacBook directly to the thunderbolt port of the second MacBook.
If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch you’ll want the latest information available on each one. There are a number of ways to synchronise different kinds of information. Here’s my suggestions as to the best solution for each area that needs syncing. If you have an Android Phone read this article instead. Continue reading 〉
I’ve been trying out the world of Android Phones recently with a Google Pixel phone. Overall I have been surprised at how simple and effortless it has been to use my Google pixel phone alongside my Macintosh OS X. I was expecting it to be a lot harder to synchronise the Google phone to my Macintosh computer but if anything I have found it easier than my old iPhone.
Each individual application syncs its own data across the internet between the Google phone and OS X. Everything else gets synchronised by Google. I have found this approach surprising simple. It’s just a matter of finding the best application for each job.
Here’s a list of applications that I have found that will nicely share data between OSX, iOS and Android.
Apple file sharing is by far the easiest way to share files if you have 2 computers on the same network. For example we have a MacBook in our family room and I have a Mac Mini in my study. Sometimes I find myself wanting to access files from the other computer. With Apple file sharing you can easily access your second computer from your first one and copy across the files you need without having to go into the other room. Here’s how to set up Apple file sharing.
Dropbox and Google File Stream have big differences. Google Drive is best for publishing lots of files to multiple users. Dropbox is great to reliably sync files across your own computers. If you are used to Dropbox, don’t think of Google File Stream as being like Dropbox. Here are some of the differences:
Dropbox keeps a copy of the files locally on your computer so that you can access the files offline.
Google Drive only downloads the files as you need them
Dropbox makes it very easy to share files publicly on the web via a link.
Google Drive can share files publicly but it’s a little trickier to set up.
Dropbox is best for syncing your own personal files across multiple computers.
Google Drive is best for an organisation to make files available to multiple users.
Dropbox has less space available on the free plan.
Google Drive gives you 25GB of storage per user!
Google Drive has some great WordPress plugins available to embed documents in WordPress. (I’ve done this here)
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