Document management PC/iPad

[tonypitt]

I'm trying to figure out a document management strategy that makes sense and works with my iPad. I'd appreciate any helpful advice others can offer.

In my job I'm continuously creating new documents. I store all of these on a USB drive. Whenever I insert this drive on either my home or work machine, I use a program to automatically mirror new files to a backup drive. I also do daily incremental backups of all files to iDrive.

I'd like to be able to view my files on my iPad, but it's a pain to have to manually move files over as I create them using GoodReader. Basically, I'd like to be able to designate certain folders on my removable drive and have documents placed in those folders also readable on my iPad. Is there anything out there that will do that?

The perfect thing would be if I could access iDrive in a manner similar to Dropbox, but there doesn't seem to be a utility that does that.

Is there anything out that that will allow me to more easily managing the syncing of files between my desktop and my iPad?

 

[Johnny Cakes]

The iPad could be an excellent business machine for people who need documents in the field but, as you point out, it is not easy to sync the iPad with the PC.

DropBox is great except: (1) it uses the standard PDF reader; and (2) unless you "star" documents, the docs are in the cloud, not locally on the iPad. This means slower opening plus must have net access.

GoodReader is great except: wifi transfer. I am suffering from the "drop wifi connection" which appears might be fixed in the next os update next week.

My solution: DiskAid -- this app basically makes the iPad a folder on the PC where you can drop complete folders in addition to individual files. It is USB based, meaning it is lightning fast and no WiFi issues. While I haven't found a good sync utility, I just "brute sync" by recopying the entire parent folder every time. Luckily because DiskAid uses USB, that's pretty fast..

I'd be interested in other peoples sync strategies.

 

[maczanre]

If you do use Dropbox (or a few other options), there are a number of ways to go really:

Air Sharing
DocsToGo
QuickOffice (seems to be the best of the "Office"suites for editing, but it doesn't use the native email account, which annoys me).

 

[Hasty]

Hmm depends a bit on the type of docs you use.
I create a lot of short pieces but I copy paste them into evernote and they appear on whatever machine I log on with. It's a kludge but with notebooks and tagging it's all quickly accessed. Best is with cloud storage your never dependant on a mislaid machine (Often leave an iPad behind.....)
Second Goodreader, though I have good wifi tg.