As Google expands into more and more of our lives it is worth thinking about what would happen if you lost access to your Google account.

Syncdocs provides extra security: in case your Google account is hacked, your files will not be accessible and can be protected by “military strength” AES encryption. However, it is better if you don’t lose you account to hackers in the first place.

A good way to add extra security is to enable Google two-factor authentication. This lets you use your cellphone or landline as a way of recovering your password. Your account is much safer and less likely to get hacked.

Matt Cutts provides more reasons to turn it on in his blog.

Syncdocs supports accounts with two-factor. Just click on “generate password” in the “application specific” password section. You can revoke access at any time without changing your password, too.

See this how to guide for a detailed walk-through on setting things up, or look at the screen-shot below for a brief explanation:

Google Two Factor setup

Sometimes you only want to upload or download your files to or from Google and not do a full sync.  The main reason for doing this is backups.

Syncdocs can easily do this. In the ‘Preferences’ menu look at the options in “Customized Sync Control”.

For example, if you only want to upload files to Google, then un-check “Download Google files to this PC”.

For more info on these options, see the Google Drive Backup guide

Syncdocs works fine in along with with SkyDrive. You can sync to both Google Docs/Drive and SkyDrive simultaneously. You can also select a subset of folders in either to sync.

Why Multiple Syncing?

There are a few reasons one might want to sync to Google Drive and SkyDrive at the simultaneously. The main reason is to get your SkyDrive files synced with Google Drive and back. This means you can easily edit SkyDrive files online, share them to anyone and access them on any device.

SkyDrive has better support to remotely access your PC than Google Drive, and it also has a more familiar Microsoft Office viewer with Office 365. Google Drive has better Google Docs integration, however.

Google Docs also provides great online collaboration and and online office suite and is accessible from more devices than SkyDrive.

You might also want to sync to multiple cloud servers for redundancy. Syncdocs uses Google Storage to store your data and SkyDrive uses Microsoft’s services.

How to Sync Google Docs to SkyDrive

You can simply select your SkyDrive folder and have it synchronize to Google Docs with Syncdocs. Here’s how:

To access the selective sync menu.

1. Right click on the Syncdocs taskbar icon, and select Preferences. Then in the folder tab, click the Select button

2. Click on “Add folder” and select My SkyDrive.

Note that you don’t have to Sync your entire SkyDrive folder, you can select a sub-folder inside it, too.

That’s it! Changes you make to stuff in SkyDrive will be synced to Google Docs and changes in Google Docs will be mirrored back to SkyDrive.

Advanced Options

You don’t have to sync the entire SkyDrive folder. You can select any sub folder or folders and only sync that to Google Drive.

This can be useful because Google gives 5GB free storage while SkyDrive gives you 7 to 25GB free.