Getting your script in sync, or How I learned write in the clouds

With the price of computers dropping, it's common nowadays for writers to have more than one computer. Perhaps you're like me and have a main desktop computer as well as a laptop computer. If you're one of those people who work on multiple computers, than you will eventually need to sync up your script file.

Now, there are several ways to do this. The old fashioned way entails by copying a script back and forth from your desktop to your laptop before you go on your next Starbucks writing session. But really, how 80's. The 90's way would be to email your script back and forth. The problem you run into is you will end up managing multiple versions of your script, and the whole point is to save you time.

If you're a windows user, Microsoft has a built in tool that is supposed to automatically sync up your files. It is called Briefcase. I call it Shitcase. I'm a computer programmer, and even I couldn't get it to work properly.

So, what to do?

Enter the cloud. That's the new buzzword. Cloud computing is all the rage. It simply means working online. Whether you're using Google Documents, or Gmail, you're cloud computing.

Microsoft has a great program called Windows Live Foldershare. It's supposed to work on both Mac and PC. Since I'm ashamedly a Windows user, I can't comment on how well it works on the Mac. But let me just say, Foldershare works amazingly well on PC.

First, you start by going to https://www.foldershare.com and downloading the Foldershare application. Once you've installed it, the program will prompt you to create an account. Than it will ask you to share a folder on your hard drive. I shared My Documents/Writing.

Than you go to your laptop and repeat the same steps, although this time, after installing the software, you don't create another account. You just log in to the account you just created. Than you select the local folder on your laptop to share.

Now, since my script is on my desktop pc, I went back to my desktop, opened up my script file and added some brilliant lines of dialogue. I save it and closed the program.

Then I went to my laptop, clicked on the foldershare icon in the system tray, and clicked on the Writing menu item which opened up an explorer window showing my share Writing folder from my Desktop PC. I opened my script file and there was the updated script with my changes. Than I added some more lines of text, saved it and viola, it is automatically synced to your file your desktop.

You can check out Foldershare here.