In: Online
10 Oct 2008There is nothing worse than needing that file you left sitting on your desktop at home and having to drive home to get it. I have seen countless solutions over the years from Norton’s PCAnywhere to Go2MyPC, and more recently the beta of Mesh and Apple’s MobileMe.
All have had their problems, but last night I tried something that blew my socks off. For both Windows XP and Vista as well as Mac OS X, welcome FolderShare. This Microsoft beta allows you to create personal and shared libraries of files, that synchronize across countless computers, as well as remote access to the file systems of both PCs and Macs.
For someone like me, it’s a dream come true. If you look at the image below, you will see I have a Personal Library set up. This is a folder located in different places on all five of the computers that I have connected. On Windows PCs it’s in My Documents, on my Macs it’s in my user directory. Regardless of it’s location, the files I place there get synchronized over the internet to all the other machines that I have enabled for synchronization for that particular folder.
In my case that’s all of them, so when I need a file, if I save it there, I have it on every PC. Sound too good to be true? Well wait, there’s more!
Remote Access sounds like you can control those machines too, while that sadly isn’t the case, it does give you full file access (download only of course) to every file on those machines as well as the external drives connected to them. In the case of the Mac it also includes any network drives mounted on that machine.
If you are needing some organization among several machines, and don’t want to pay someone for a phantom 10GB in the sky (Apple) then give this a shot at http://www.foldershare.com

Jason Burns is a technology enthusiast, Microsoft guy, photographer, musician and all around geek. This blog is the general rambling one, check out the links for the specific ones!

2 Responses to Get Access To Your Files From Anywhere with FolderShare!
Doug
October 10th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Hi, Thanks for this. I am always looking for tools like this. I have been meaning to post on dropbox that does almost the same thing but haven’t gotten around to it. Check it out anyway. http://getdropbox.com
Scott
October 11th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Wow, this is cool, but it sure does seem like Mesh, SkyDrive and now FolderShare are all canibalizing each other.