Easy file sharing using foldershare

As an employee of an international corporation, my interests are always piqued when I hear the word replication.  When I learned of an acquisition by Microsoft of a product called Byte Taxi, I checked into what it had become within the walls of the largest computer company on earth.  I found my answer in Foldershare.

Foldershare is a new product in beta.  A tiny application that sits in your taskbar and brokers connections for file sharing and replication between you and your friends, family, colleagues…whatever you want!  It also allows some interesting file access to your own machines.  If you had the desire, you could edit your hosts file from Bangladesh, all via the web.  If you want to check it out with me, contact me on google talk at wharrislv.  

A simple and free way to replicate files between your friends, work, home, etc.  This is great for sharing photos amongst family, video files and software amongst friends, and the killer app : offsite backups!  Set up replicated folders to your friends, get everyone a 1TB drive, and automate your offsite backups for free.  The taskbar app is really lightweight, and almost all configuration is done on the web, which mirrors Vista’s UI style.  User based access control allows share level permissions like read only or owner, so you can control what happens to your files.  The client works on both Windows and OSX, and the service is based in the Live ecosystem.  The developers keep a blog that could show some promise, I hope that they keep a real conversation with the beta community.  

The limit on files within a share is 10,000, which is too bad.  I’d love to sync my music collection to work, but I’ll have to continue using the streaming functionality of Jukefly.  The developers have said that they are considering an increase in the future, but for now we’re stuck with that limitation.   Additionally, you can only sync files up to 2gb.  I don’t personally see the reason for these limitations, but I imagine they’re in place to get people ready for the inevitable switch to a payment based model.

One glaring omission is the ability to control your bandwidth utilization.  My measly 1mb upstream can be saturated with replication at times, but overall the feature set makes it all worth it.  You also cannot share network drives, which is a huge oversight in the modern world of network attached storage.

I encourage everyone to give this service a try, the fact that it is free for now makes it all the more attractive.  Let me know what you think about the service in the comments below, I’m curious!