Syncing folders between Vista, XP, and OSX – part 2

FolderShare rocks!FolderShare: Kickin’ butt, takin’ names & flingin’ bytes!

So far I have to admit that I really like the ease of use and simplicity of FolderShare. I am impressed. It takes less than 5 minutes to set up a machine – and it’s all done online. The setup is a bit cryptic and left me wondering for a bit how to select the folders. There isn’t a contextual menu like I first thought, instead you log in at FolderShare.com and create libraries in which to sync to the various clients. You have to do this for each client, and again it’s all online; so you can select the path, and even create a new folder if you are syncing an empty folder to a specific library.

I really have to give credit where it’s due. This is an excellent application, and I am glad I found it on Scott’s list of tools.

I have yet to connect up the remaining two systems to sync to this library, so I may still be disappointed, but I don’t think so and I certainly hope not. Here are the Operating Systems I have synced so far:

  • Windows XP Pro SP2
  • OS X 10.4

I have still another XP box and my Vista (Home Premium) install to sync with these two.
The syncing is extremely fast as it works over your LAN. Just sitting here watch it go it seems to be taking 5 – 7 minutes for every gb of data transferred, give or take. It’s still going to take quite a lot of time; seeing that I have 49 gb of music and video in my library so far. You have 2 options for syncing the folders as well; active sync or on-demand sync. For now, I think I will leave everything at active sync, but I may change it later to only sync when I tell it to – and even then, that will probably only be for my laptop. I don’t really see myself trying to sync any of this library over the web.

FolderShare is still only in beta right now, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I run into some sort of trouble, and I would expect more features to come as well. The web interface lacks some polish giving plenty of room for improvement in how the interface functions, how it looks and how it lends itself to ease of use while still looking nice. It’s not ugly now; just sparse.

Microsoft has pulled off a good little free application, and hats off to them for making it cross-platform when many other right now are not. Mac is their primary competition, so it was quite refreshing to see them tip their hats to the folks at Apple.

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