My Review of FolderShare (compared to Groove)

Alright, enough prodding guys.

Yes, I use FolderShare. And I love it. So much so that I’ve been telling lots of other people about it. And they love it too.

My biggest problem is that I have roughly 4-5 computers - and I have files on all of them. All I want is the same working set of files on all my computers, all the time. If I make a change on my Tablet, I want my PowerBook to have the change. If I make a change on my PC at home, I want all my other PCs to have it.

(BTW, the Windows Offline Folders stuff is painful to use. Sometimes if you create a folder in an offline folder, it doesn’t replicate. I don’t get it.)

For a while I tried using a usb keychain. That sucked and was slow.

Then I bought a copy of Groove. Groove was fantastic and saved me so much time. So I used it more and more and more. And it got slower and slower and slower. Didn’t quite meet my needs if I couldn’t sync my iTunes folder and my photos folder. And it didn’t have Mac support.

Fortunately Dan was aware of my Mac-pains and forwarded me a blog entry that FolderShare was beta testing their Mac client.

FolderShare! I had looked at that before… their pricing scheme had changed and become far more user friendly. Woot! Met my needs!

I installed it on my PC’s, and it worked like a charm. It happily synced all 7442 photos of mine, from PC to PC. It happily synced 1306 iTunes files, from PC to PC.

And the Mac beta… well… uh… to be honest, it deleted a lot of my files because of some bugs I helped them find. Good thing for backups. And now those bugs are fixed so my Mac has all the same files as well. Rock solid!

Best yet, FolderShare now works with Windows Desktop Search (coincidentally the product I work on at Microsoft), so I can search all my PC’s from their web interface. Neat!

My next step with FolderShare is to setup an ultra cheap PC at my parents place in NY, so that all my files are replicated there as well for backup. [I mean, it's not like an earthquake will swallow up my PCs in California, and a terrorists will blow up NYC at the same time, right?] The Iomega Network Hard Drive looks interesting… but there’s not enough details about how it works to satisfy me.

Hey FolderShare guys - if you’re reading this, could you please make this improvement as soon as possible:

Auto-Update capability - so I don’t have to manually check for updates? This 2.5.7 update looks pretty important!

Thanks!

Finally, I must note that Groove is still an awesome app - especially if you’re looking for decentralized collaboration. Alas, I don’t need to collaborate with myself - just sync files and folders. Give Groove a try! It really is a Virtual Office.