December 1st: Syncplicity Business Edition Live Demo
The Syncplicity Business Edition live demo is tomorrow! Our very own Rachel Pennig will be running you through the Syncplicity Business Edition service and the benefits to your company with Q&A shortly thereafter.
Click here to register for the December 1st live web demo at 11am PST / 2pm EST.
If you can’t make the time, let us know if you would like to see more live demos in the future.
Cheers,
The Syncplicity Team
Mac Beta is out!
Today we are excited to announce the publicly available Syncplicity Mac Beta Client! With this release, Syncplicity users can share files between their Windows and Mac computers with ease. Any file changes made on one computer will sync to the other computer.
For those of you coming from backup products, there is no schedule option for Syncplicity. The client watches your files for changes and uploads the new versions immediately, it doesn’t wait a minimum of 4 hours like you may be used to. And for those using other ‘one folder’ sync products, you do not have to move all your documents to a new folder. Syncplicity will sync them wherever they are now.
Just like with the Windows version, any Mac folder can become a Syncplicity folder by right clicking the folder and adding it to Syncplicity. Once it’s a Syncplicity folder, the Syncplicity client will watch the folder for changes and immediately synchronize the changes to your other computers. New and updated files will be securely backed up by Syncplicity, past revisions will be available on the Syncplicity website, and the latest versions will be sync’ed to your other computers.
Our Windows users will immediately recognize the Syncplicity icon sitting pretty in the menu bar. Syncplicity communicates its status through the menu icon and the grayed lines in the pop-down menu. For the geekier users, you can find out what Syncplicity is up to by watching the trace window.
If you have a Mac, give the new beta a whirl. As this is a beta, please send us feedback!
Happy Sync’ing!
Isaac
Infrastructure Upgrade
At 5 PM PDT on Tuesday, September 23rd, Syncplicity will be performing a major scheduled upgrade. Given the size and complexity of the change, we expect the transition to take about seven hours. During this time, your computer will be unable to synchronize with Syncplicity and my.syncplicity.com will be unavailable. www.syncplicity.com and blog.syncplicity.com will continue to be available.
You can leave your client running during this time — it will automatically reconnect and resume synchronizing when we are back up. And of course, your data and account information will be kept safe & secure throughout the process.
Our team will be working throughout the night until this migration is complete — we will be twittering updates (http://twitter.com/syncplicity) along the way. Feel free to say hi if you’re online too.
For those of you wondering what we’re up to, here’s the scoop:
Behind the scenes, Syncplicity runs on some pretty serious hardware. Part of my job is to keep it running smoothly and plan for future growth.
The Syncplicity servers handle millions of requests every day. During the past few months, Syncplicity has been growing quickly and our servers have been under an increasingly high load. Even with several hardware upgrades, we’ve still had some brownouts during which some of you were unable to get the instant synchronization we built into the service. Like you, we notice when our tray icon turns gray.
A month ago, we embarked on a plan to perform a major refresh of our infrastructure to eliminate these problems and ensure ample room to grow. We’ve invested heavily in new servers and a new architecture that we’re finally ready to unveil. Our server count is tripling. Individual servers will be more powerful.
For example, as part of the upgrade, all our database servers will be moving to quad-proc, quad-core servers. Watching 16 cores in action is intense. We’re also scaling out to increase redundancy and improve reliability and scalability. This translates into a better experience for all users and as a small bonus, I know I’ll be sleeping better at night. 
Thanks,
Isaac
VP of Technology
Access your files from your iPhone
2/9/10 edit: Looking to use Syncplicity on the iPhone? Check out MKSync, a third-party application, on the iTunes store!
Today, we’re excited to announce that all the files you’re backing up & sync’ing with Syncplicity are available from your iPhone! We made an optimized version of our website just for our iPhone (and iPod Touch) users. The website currently lets you view documents, photos, and hear your mp3s.
If you have an iPhone, here’s what you’ll see when you login and try to open the San Francisco Muni Map PDF:
To view the site, navigate to https://m.syncplicity.com on your iPhone. The https://my.syncplicity.com site redirects if it detects you’re on an iPhone. And, be sure to add it to your home screen for easier access by clicking the plus icon and clicking “Add to Home Screen”.
Let us know if you’re using it and how you’d like to see it extended.
Cheers,
Isaac
Newest Syncplicity Employee
hello everyone! i wanted to introduce myself to the syncp community. i recently joined and i’m already right in the thick of it! since the first beta, i’ve been playing around with syncplicity and thought it was a really good product. leonard and i had met through a mutual friend of ours and quickly bonded over the trials of startup life. at the time, i had founded my own startup and was trying to get that off the ground. like many other people on the forums, i had been badgering him to develop a syncp mac client since most of my personal files are on macs.
when leonard decided they would make the mac client one of their highest priorities, i was inbetween things and he somehow convinced me that if i wanted a mac client, the quickest way possible would be if i wrote it myself. this will teach me never to ask for anything again . i also discovered that isaac and ondrej were really awesome guys and also much smarter me, so it was an easy decision.
looking at the forums, i’m pleasantly surprised by the number of people who have given syncplicity such positive and useful feedback. i am really excited to have such quality users and will work hard to match the level of excellence the windows client has achieved. i will be contributing to the forums from now on. if you have a concern or idea for the mac client, feel free to drop me a line on the forums or directly at ian[at]syncplicity[dot]com.
-ian
Improved online file browser
We’re excited to announce an improved online file browser for files you’re synchronizing with Syncplicity. In this release we made the following improvements:
- Recycle a file/folder – Moves a file to the Recycle Bin online and on your local computers
- Permanently delete a file/folder – Completely remove a file from Syncplicity’s backup
- Empty Syncplicity Recycle Bin – Clears all deleted files from Syncplicity’s backup
- Add New Directory – Create a new directory from the online browser
- New navigation buttons: Back & Forward, and Up Directory
- Improved the tree navigation and fixed several bugs
Here’s a shot of the new file browser in action:
There’s a brand new pop-out menu on files. You can either right-click on a file/folder or click the little Syncplicity icon to bring it up. Right now, we have a few options in the menu and we’re planning several more. Here’s the menu in action:
And here’s the menu when you’re browsing deleted files in the Syncplicity Recycle Bin:
We’re excited to publish these updates as they’re based on a lot of user feedback. Keep sending us your suggestions!
- Isaac
Lots of data!
Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Isaac. Today, the database, a few back-end systems, and the website are my focus. Let me tell you a little about what makes this pretty darn interesting from a DBA perspective:
The Syncplicity database is pretty incredible. Most website databases perform a lot of read operations and a few writes, mainly to maintain a little state information about the user. I think 10 – 100 KB is more than enough state information per user for almost any web database. However, the Syncplicity database is nothing like that. Our databases have quickly grown to triple digit GBs in size as we synchronize your files across all your computers. That’s a lot of state and a lot of writing. Pretty incredible! And, we’re scaling very well to handle the load. So, keep it coming!
Feel free to contact me thru the comments, forums, or Contact page if there’s something you’d like to know. We’ve got some exciting information in the works… stay tuned!
Cheers,
Isaac – VP of Technology
The New Syncplicity Blog
We publicly launched on April 15th, 2008. Most Americans know this day as tax day but for us it was a great day. We finally got to reveal our site and service to everyone. We’ve been working hard since launch to incorporate all your feedback. Since then, we’ve worked to make the service easier to use and understand and work just like you’d expect. Continue sending us feedback and we’ll do our best to improve this service.
We’re starting this blog so we can share some of our ideas with you. We also want to let you in on a little inside information as we go along. Stay tuned.