Tranquil PC's Weblog

For many years now (or so it feels), I’ve been using an amazing, free and low overhead utility ‘Foldershare’.  Microsoft bought ByteTaxi in 2005, the owners of Foldershare – a neat little application that had been out there since 2002.

In essence it’s a service that is installed on each PC that you may want to ’share folders’ with other PCs you own, or need access to.  Of course installing Foldershare onto a Windows Home Server suddenly opens up opportunities of remotely backing up and syncronsing files / folders with distant PCs.  The files / folders are also accessible via any web browser, just to make things really easy.

It’s all secure, no data is stored on ‘unknown PCs’, it’s free, and runs just like it should.  Microsoft now are using some of the ’services’ in certain LIVE products, and Foldershare now seems to have had a facelift, with more of a Microsoft LIVE look to it.

You can get it from here.  

Install it on your Home Server, using Remote Desktop Connection, or one of the Home Server Add-Ins (ie Program Launcher).  Then install it on any number of other PCs – and start ’sync’ing’ – only small catch, there are some limits to the number of files in each library, but you can have numerous libraries too.

Notes

• You can transfer files that don’t exceed 2GB. You can also create up to ten libraries, each of which can contain up to 10,000 files.
• FolderShare beta installs a system file called .fslockfile in the folder that contains your library. This system file is necessary to run FolderShare beta.
• FolderShare beta doesn’t work with mapped network drives.

Enjoy !