I am considering purchasing a small laptop computer for travel, which I would use to access the internet and also do word processing. However, I would want to keep this laptop in sync with my desktop computer (so I can sync my desktop to laptop before travelling, and then sync the laptop to the desktop upon returning). I don’t need to update the various settings and configurations, just the files. Is there any software readily available, paid or free, to keep the computers in sync?

This is a very good question and this is something which I do myself between my desktop computer and laptop. However, I assume that you are running Windows-based computers. In my case, I am running two Mac computers (Mac Pro as my desktop and MacBook as my laptop). It is relatively easy to keep my two computers in sync, as I copy my entire user profile (contained in one directory) between the two computers. I use a piece of software called ChronoSync for this purpose. Unfortunately this is not as easy on a Windows-based platform, as your user profile directory contains many configuration specific settings (with quite a few files that often cannot be copied while the computer is running, as they are in-use). That said, since you only wish to keep your documents in sync between the computers this makes the process much easier.

At a high level, you would essentially like to keep your My Documents folders in sync between the two computers. There are two pieces of software which I have used in the past and proven to be very good at keeping a source and destination in sync. Microsoft SyncToy (www.microsoft.com/downloads) is a free utility allowing you to synchronise two directories. Another utility which I highly recommend, and I currently use to transfer data between my home and work PCs, is ViceVersa (www.tgrmn.com). This is not free software, but is relatively inexpensive and does a very good job of keeping two directories in sync. In either case, you will need to setup a network between the two computers and allow each computer to access the folder you wish to keep in sync on the other computer. This is a relatively simple procedure, but does take a while to explain, but there are plenty of guides on the internet to explain how this can be done. There are also other software packages which allow you to keep two computers in sync, and these can be found by doing a quick Google search. However, I have found that the two utilities above have met my needs well in the past. I would be interested to hear how you decide to proceed and how you eventually setup your synchronisation.