foldershare

April 18th, 2006

fsico.jpg

The Problem: You’ve got a couple of computers, some PCs, some Macs, maybe some are at work, maybe some are at home, and you have a bunch of files that it would be very useful to have on all of them.

The Solution: You could turn on SMB sharing on your Mac and PC and then hack together some weird rsync shell script coupled with a cron script to synchronize the contents of each share — then you could adjust your firewall and forward some ports on your router so you could get to these files at work. Yeah, that sounds like fun.

Possibly The Better Solution: There’s this company called “FolderShare” that has created quite an excellent utility for doing just that. In fact, they did such a good job writing this utility and corresponding website that Microsoft out and bought them up in November of last year to add to their nebulous “Windows Live” project. Now as a result of this acquisition, Microsoft offers the FolderShare service for free, but I don’t think anyone really knows about it.

It’s quite straightforward to set up — just sign up for an account, download and install the utility on each machine, and select “My FolderShare” to open a browser window and select which folders on which machines are to be added to the share. I had two macs and one PC all synced up on my local network within a couple minutes. All transfers between the machines are encrypted and occur transparently behind the scenes. Plus, there’s a web interface you can use to give yourself and others access to these shared files from anywhere. Nifty!

The only major downsides are: no linux client (and don’t hold your breath, but again, you could use the web interface to at least get access to the files) — and on Mac OS X, installing the FolderShare client plops a honkingly ugly and useless app in your dock. If that bugs you (it bugged me) get rid of the dock icon with handy little utility called Dockless. Also a downside: on some level you’ve got to put some trust in Microsoft, which is always a dodgy proposition.

~jeff



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  • http://www.ldopa.net/ Evan

    I haven’t seen that folder in the live.com shit yet. I’m a beta tester for a bunch of the non-public live crap, and I don’t know if I’d use a lot of it. It seems a little too unpolished to be used for a lot. Of all the things they’re doing, I’m kind of excited about the OfficeLive stuff. I think I’m still most disturbed at the slowness of Javascript under IE. Sure, it’s still “beta” but jeez. On the other hand I think people are going to be impressed with what MS has been working on.

  • Arbole

    .Gac, er, Gdisk is coming!

  • http://www.connecting-point.net Ace

    you hit the nail on the head with this entry….been using it for 2 days when i stumbled upon your entry…thanks for the dockless idea. the icon has been getting to me, why didnt they just do like gmail notifier and not have one in the first place??

    ace

  • Enzo

    I absolutely require Foldershare as it allows me to work on multiple computers without regards to platform. But the ugly dock icon does get to me and once I know its finished synching I quit.
    Dockless seems like a beautiful solution. Is there a Universal version of it? Is there another one similar to it?

    Enzo

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  • Miles

    If you want to get rid of the dock icon by hand, you can do the following:
    Close FolderShare, then open the FolderShare.app package in /Applications and go into the Contents directory. From there, open the Info.plist file and add the line
    NSUIElement
    1
    alongside the other … entries.

    Save the file and restart FolderShare – the Dock icon should be gone!

  • Miles

    The XML in my comment got deleted… so around “NSUIElement” put ‘key’ XML tags and around “1″ put ‘string’ tags. You’ll see the format when you open the Info.plist file.