Review: Microsoft Foldershare

Sunday, March 26, 2006

So I'm working well into a Sunday night - don't shed any tears, it's a fun project - and during a brain break, I stumbled across a great little app called Foldershare that looks like it might make certain data-synching headaches go away. Even weirder - it's made by Micro$oft! For reals! Okay, technically they got smart and acquired a smart little fish to add to their mangled "Windows Live" framework, but whatever, the app itself is pretty cool.

Om Malik reviewed Foldershare last year and also posted an update about their commitment to the Mac client.

Foldershare is a free beta app that automagically synches folders across different machines, even OS X and Windows. Think of it as a networked drive, but 1) uses the entire internet as its local network and 2) has true synching. In other words it's not just a fancy client-side version of server-side data storage, or FTP For Dummies, it doesn't require you to manually drag stuff in a common folder on one machine and then drag it back out again on another (although you can do that). Although I could be wrong, I've been watching online storage startups for a little while now (Michael Arrington's review sums it up nicely) and this is exactly how most of them seem to work. Instead, Foldershare will run in the background and automatically pop files created in a pre-existing folder on one machine onto a folder on the other, and it'll go both ways too.

For example, on the Windows box at work, I've got a folder full of pics of Audi RS4s in all their hi-res glory. I use a shareware app called "John's Background Switcher" that uses all the pics in that folder to randomly swap out my desktop backgrounds. I've got a similar batch of photos for the exact same purpose on my powerbook, except it also has photos of motorcycles and the Ford Reflex concept car in addition to completely different RS4 pics. Once I fired up Foldershare on both machines and logged in, I specified which folders to synch and then blammo! I had the photos of both computers on each.

And if you stop to think about it, it's also acting as a data backup solution. Each photograph went from being saved on one machine to being on two (there aren't any server-side copies of the data because it's a P2P app). If my powerbook were to die (which it very well could do), those photographs are now backed up on the work machine and vice versa.

Can you imagine what kind of fun you could have with a home network? Your files would fly around a fast local wifi network without needing to get on the big bad internet at all. Every single machine would be a music or media server, have all of your work files, whatever. I really could have used this last year, when I had 4 computers bouncing around the apartment. Two were old laptops doing single purpose things they could handle, like downloading TV shows or playing music, while I worked away on my iBook doing web work and had a Windows box for IE testing purposes and occasionally batch processing photos in Fireworks. You can imagine the file synching issues.

This all got started because my work is moving offices in April and we were advised to save or backup any local files we had. These pics are the only thing I really need to keep with me, so my first geeky inclination was to zip them up and upload them to my own personal server for later, but man, that seemed like a ginormous pain in the ass. Especially since I'd have to go through the whole process again every time I saved a new photo. In comparison, this was totally painless to setup and now it'll maintain itself without any further work. Well done, Foldershare people - you have at least one new fan today.

More reviews:

  • FolderShare at Chastney Towers - stick around to the end for a great "Foldershare saves the day" story about how Graham forgot his sermon at home and logged on from the church computer to grab it from there.
  • keep your PCs in sync with FolderShare - more in-depth review by JK about how he uses Foldershare.
  • The Sony U- the original UMPC? - JK makes an interesting observation in the comments thread; he's going to use Foldershare to keep his Origami-style mini-computer synched to his home network.

elsewhere on the web: , , , ,

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