What is the most clever and easy approach to sync data between multiple entities?

Question

In today’s world where a lot of computers, mobile devices or web services share data or act like hubs, syncing gets more important. As we all know solutions that sync aren’t the

Answer 1

Probably "Not a real question", here is not a real answer:

I think distributed version control systems (such as Mercurial or git) have figured out a big part of this. However, they require that people accept that there can be more than one "most recent" version, and that sometimes conflicting updates need manual resolution to resolve. Also, if you are not interested in keeping the whole change history, there is quite a bit of overhead in these systems (but of course the recent history is necessary to find common ancestors to determine how the two versions relate).

But I agree with you that in a world where everyone has data spread across multiple devices and services, the need to automatically keep track of and distribute the updates will become so urgent that the common file formats used by applications will include enough meta-data to facilitate some kind of intelligent merging behaviour. But that behaviour will probably have to happen on the application level, because there is no generic way to resolve conflicting updates.

In the mean-time, the iTunes-iPod approach is the easiest: You have only one master library and every device pulls from there. Obviously, single-master-sync is not very satisfactory in all scenarios (especially when more than one user is involved), but still, I would appreciate it if more applications offered the option to work like that (pet peeve: I have three Macs, with three iPhoto installations. If they sync'd automatically from one dedicated master, just like the photos sync to my iPod, that would be an improvement).