Naquada

We all have multiple machines, your work laptop, your home PC, your Mac, and you end up normally having to move stuff around between them. Although I don’t tend to move much stuff from my work Thinkpad to my Mac’s the idea of being able to replicate realtime between machines has always been interesting.

In 2005 Microsoft Acquired FolderShare, a provider of emerging space file synchronisation and remote access technology. FolderShare, now part of the Windows Live Service allows you to securely keep files synchronised between your devices, share files with friends or colleagues, and remotely download your files from any web browser.

All sounds good in theory, but I’ve tried various sync utilities before, and none have ever really worked very well.. They have either only supported Windows, or Mac support’s be terrible and lagging too far behind windows versions (in some cases the Mac and PC clients haven’t even been compatible!)

The architecture for FolderShare seems to be quite simple;

FolderShare consists of two components – My FolderShare and the FolderShare Satellite. ‘My FolderShare’ is the web site that you use to administrate, invite, and generally manage your account, The FolderShare satellite is the software you run on your PC or Mac to allow synchronisation between the devices you choose.

We tried a simple set-up between three of our machines within the IBM network. Each machine having a folder, and one inviting the other two to sync a folder. The result was quite interesting, a file dropped into the folder on any machine, appeared a few moments later (depending on size of course) on all the other machines. Since the satellite works in the background, the files silently moved over to the other machines after they were added to the folder.

Set-up is pretty simple as well.. sign up, define your folders, repeat for each folder on each device you want sync’ed, start syncing..

The mechanism seems to be peer to peer encrypted, although I’ve not done any extensive testing yet.. There is a limit of file size though, each file can be a maximum of 2gig at the moment, which would suffice for most files I guess..

Would I use this? between the Mac and PC, possibly not, between PC’s maybe.. Across the internet.. jury is out..

It seems like a neat idea, and being Microsoft, apparently ‘There is NO spyware or adware‘ within the package..

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