The Official Word on FolderShare Becoming Windows Live Sync

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://foldershareteam.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!9D186A323DE6761!1646.entry' target='_blank'>http://foldershareteam.spaces.live....6761!1646.entry</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"We want to let you know what's next for FolderShare, and to make you aware of some important upcoming changes. In December, we will release a new product called Windows Live Sync. You can think of it as FolderShare 2.0...A huge part of Sync's success story depends on FolderShare users like you. When Sync releases, FolderShare goes into retirement. That means your FolderShare software will stop working and will ask you to upgrade to Sync. Once you do, Sync will automatically rebuild your personal folders. We expect a lot of new users when Sync is released, so if you can't sign in right away, please give it a little time."</em></p><p>Well, we knew this was coming, but I was hoping for something a bit more interesting with this all-new version now dubbed Live Sync. Here are the features they listed:</p><ul><li>More folders and files - sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each.</li><li>Integration with Windows Live ID - no more extra sign-in stuff to remember.</li><li>Integration with the Recyle Bin - no more separate Trash folder to fiddle with.</li><li>New client versions for both Windows and Mac.</li><li>Unicode support - sync files in other languages. </li></ul><p>Moving to Windows Live ID is nice, and the integration with the Recycle Bin is also very slick - but because I was already a professional user (migrated over from the Byte Taxi days) I already had the 20,000 files per library limit. This is huge news for all the people who were previously limited to 10,000 files. So what am I complaining about? Well, I have just over 21,000 files in my Pictures folder, and I've been using FolderShare to sync that folder. You'd think it wouldn't have worked once I broke past 20K, but it did...and now I'm rather scared that it will stop working. I was really hoping that by the time they launched this new service they'd have a professional offering ready to go - because this is certainly something I'm willing to pay for.</p><p>There's also the prevailing question of Live Mesh - how long can the Windows Live team have two products that are nearly identical?</p>

[ptyork]

There's also the prevailing question of Live Mesh - how long can the Windows Live team have two products that are nearly identical?</p>
I'm still unsure of what FolderShare (er, Live Sync) can possibly offer that will be better than Live Mesh. I suppose it may be a little lighter weight. Certainly I prefer the "stealth" of the service over Live Mesh, which seems to want to change the nature of synced folders and add that worthless and annoying news pane. However, to me the benefit of being able to selectively store some folders "in the cloud" while keeping others strictly P2P seems to me to be a major plus. And Mesh will support mobile devices. Live Mesh is (or at least soon will be) a superset of Live Sync in terms of functionality.

I'm wondering if the move to Live ID is in preparation to allow the services to be more easily merged in the not too distant future. I've moved to Mesh already, and aside from some niggling issues (like that news pane and not syncing hidden files and folders--something they plan to fix along with some better per-folder configuration options), I haven't missed FolderShare. Given the potential power of the Mesh platform for other application data sync needs, I'm sold...until something better comes along.

[Jason Dunn]

I haven't missed FolderShare. Given the potential power of the Mesh platform for other application data sync needs, I'm sold...until something better comes along.

I have a Live Mesh account but haven't used it in a while. Does it finally sync over a local network properly? As in, at LAN speeds, not at Internet modem upload speeds? And are there any limits to the number of files in a given folder?

[ptyork]

I have a Live Mesh account but haven't used it in a while. Does it finally sync over a local network properly? As in, at LAN speeds, not at Internet modem upload speeds? And are there any limits to the number of files in a given folder?
P2P LAN sync works just fine for me. I think you need access to the WAN for it to work (for authentication and node discovery purposes), but it uses LAN bandwidth for the transfers.

As for limits, I'm not sure. They state something like no more than 10GB in all folders, but I don't think this is actually the case (I know I've synced 50GB's of music and pictures in the past, though at this moment I'm not so I can't be 100% sure). Given that they plan to up the limits of the cloud storage to 25GB soon, I'm confident that this limit will be removed or greatly increased. They also state something like no more than 100,000 files total across all folders, but again, I'm not in a position to test it. Note, I say "they say" because I'm looking at a 2nd party reporting of these numbers and they also say that the are changing with each release.

Paul