Syncing Folders and FolderShare
Posted on July 3, 2007
24 Comments
I had an interesting challenge at work this week. I think I have a rather simple solution (below), but am still open to ideas –I’m always willing to admit that I haven’t seen every clever tool out there yet!
The Setup
We have several large document libraries stored on file servers. Each is a collection of documents used for one of our vertical applications with our online interview & forms population solutions.
The challenge was to come up with a way to enable a team several thousand miles away to work on new and updated forms in one of the document libraries as simply as possible. This team is from a different company, being brought in to do some piece work on the forms.
Traditionally, we’d probably have gone with a site to site VPN connection and some “dummy” user credentials, but that’s a method I’d like to get away from for a variety of reasons. It just becomes a pain to manage over time and folks get bogged down keeping track of multiple ids. Editing files over a VPN connection gets tedious as well.
Seemed like we’d want to look for a relatively simple way to some some large directory syncing.
Enter FolderShare
While pondering this, I remembered a product by the name of FolderShare that I’d written about quite some time ago (so long ago I can’t even find it now [1]). This is something that Microsoft acquired back in November 2005. I’ve used it in the past with some friends and for whatever reason drifted away from it.
FolderShareTM allows you to create a private peer-to-peer network that will help you to synchronize files across multiple devices and access or share files with colleagues and friends. [...] FolderShare allows you to share and sync important information instantly with anyone you invite, making it the perfect solution for personal or small business use.
I did a bit of testing and it seems like just the ticket for this particular scenario. Looks like I can install it on my server and setup a “foldershare” for the directory housing the document library. I then send a foldershare invite to the other folks, they install the client and point it to where they want their copy of the library to be housed. Then the magic begins and files begin to sync back and forth.
In my limited testing I noticed that adding new files to folders and updating existing files are sync’d over almost instantly. There is also an option to change that to “on demand” which might, in this case, work better for us — helping to control bandwidth usage, for instance.
Another plus was I had both test machines behind “enterprise” grade firewalls and had no issues. Didn’t need to do any port massaging and didn’t need to turn on UPnP (thankfully).
Anything I should be aware of? Other alternatives to look at? [2]
I toyed with doing a Hamachi VPN between us and them and then using something like SyncToy (like this article), but for the need this seems to make more sense – and I don’t have to mess around with additional domain authentication or, heaven forbid, domain trusts.
Updates
[1] – Found it
[2] – I forgot mention that Microsoft has a “best practices/security” document available.
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24 Responses to “Syncing Folders and FolderShare”
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Foldershare is one of the first few things I install on any computer I’m going to use. I’m on the road a lot and what’s not in box.net IS in foldershare.
Between the two of them, I’m never that far from my information and the part where I can sync from multiple machines in multiple locations seamlessly. I love them both.
If you ever find a way to get box.net to work with foldershare I’ll buy you dinner at Choppers next time I’m in town!
[...] Zeitgeist « Syncing Folders and FolderShare [...]
Hey Rich, the more I play with FolderShare, the more I wonder why I had uninstalled it last year… this thing is slick!
I don’t know if this is what you actually need…unless it’s only one person/physically coordinated group that is working on the documents.
What happens in foldershare if two people modify the same document at the same time in different ways? The last committer wins? or the first one? or neither?
My first thought when I saw the post yesterday (and I have no clue why I didn’t post this then) would have been a CVS or SVN repository…hell, maybe even the version control thing that MS has.
That’s what I do when I have 2 or more people/teams working in a group of files/documents, and it’s always worked very well.
Good thoughts, Vox. In this case, the “remote” team is doing all the document massaging. The home team is doing all the QA and verification. Fortunately, I don’t need to worry about the same doc being changed in two places.
If that were a concern, I’d definitely go with a version control type solution as you suggest. Fortunately, I don’t need to! Neither group are coders. SVN or VSS would be an additional expense just with the “conceptual” learning curve.
Thanks again though — I definitely should mention ideas I’ve discarded when I do these sorts of posts
FolderShare is definitely a cool program – I have been using it for about 6 months now. There is a very serious limitation – the program can only share folders with an unspecified (at least I have not found the figure) number of files. I did not know this until I logged into my account – there was no error message or anything associated with this issue. It will simply drop one of the computers in the ‘network’ with no warning. Very frustrating when you work remotely and use two computers for work (i.e. a laptop and a desktop).
Just my two cents. Other than the issue above, I love the program.
@Brock – Thanks for sharing that. It might cause some grief!
In your experience, is it a certain number of files in *a* folder, number of files in all folders under the shared one?
No worries for the info. It is the second option you ask about above, the number of all the files in the all the folders under the shared one (at least that is how I am reading it). In my shared folder, there are 3,468 files and 270 folders currently. Not sure when FolderShare went dead.
Thanks for coming back, Brock!
I have a foldershare share with ~6800 files and 640 folders that seems to be working.
Of course, now you have me a bit nervous.
You know what would be *really* nice for testing stuff like this? I have two PCs on the same lan — I wish I could get the share going direct instead of having to send it all via my much slower internet connection.
Interesting – well maybe I will try and reinstall FolderShare later today to see if it syncs up. I’ll let you know what happens.
bam
FolderShare has a 10,000 file limit per library, upto 10 libraries. It’s mentioned in their FAQ. I hit that limit too frequently, and hate to breakup folder hierarchy, so started looking for alternatives. Also, it hasn’t been updated in 2 years or so. BeInSync, the competition, has been releasing new major updates every 6 months. Newest v3.0 has integration with Amazon S3 for “free” 5GB backup (worth $15/yr or so, obviously absorbed in the $60/yr cost for the Pro version). I’ll give BeInSync a try soon… Other alternatives could be Allway Sync and Groove 2007.
Thanks for that, “extremely well.” Right now, FS is working pretty well for me, but it’s good to be aware of options.
I’d forgotten all about Groove… Man, I remember playing with that 5 years ago it seems like. Microsoft bought it, right?
Microsoft bought Groove a few years ago and later made Groove’s founder and CEO Ray Ozzie the #1 tech man in Microsoft, replacing Bill Gates (who actually wasn’t such a great technical person, in comparison IMHO). Gates was more lucky and great in marketing/business. Ozzie’s genuis+creativity will probably bring back a lot of innovation to MS so it can compete better against Google and Apple, the current “innovative kings” at least in the common eye. Microsoft lately decided to fight piracy heavily, so future Windows/Office will HAVE to be purchased worldwide – hence MS will no longer flood the market (turning blind eye to piracy) in order to maintain power/monopoly.
All of the top dog tech companies have always stolen ideas from everyone anyway – but the ones who made an impact are the ones who filtered for the BEST ideas, improved them, and massaged them for easy digestion by the end-user, and of course made effective cheap marketing tricks to convince the blissfully ignorant masses that “THEY” are the ones who invented the new features (while in effect they just slightly improved on existing good ideas).
Thanks!
Shame on me, forgetting about Ozzie. I’m blushing.
[...] (e.g. Restore). I want an exact duplicate in two places. While reading about FolderShare on Chris Kasten’s blog, someone there referred to Allway [...]
Hi,
Try PowerFolder – It’s an open-source alternative to FolderShare.
Homepage: http://www.powerfolder.com
Thanks for the link, Christian. I have some upcoming projects that’ll be too big for FolderShare so perhaps I’ll give that one a shot.
Hey Chris, don’t hesitate to contact me. I would be happy to support you.
Just three benefits of PowerFolder:
- It’s pure p-2-p. So you are pretty independed from any third party.
- It offers delta syncing (copies only the changed parts of a file).
- and Data CAN but is not required to be stored on a Online Storage. So it’s always accessible, even if the computer(s) are offline. Also useful if you need the data highly available.
Christian – you are a life saver!!
I have spent most of this evening finding names of synching tools, eventually finding FolderShare – the second I tried synching MyDocs I get the 10k limit message, so I was stuck, until PowerFolder!!
Those who’ve tried: what’s your experience with PowerFolder so far? Does it work well behind common household wifi routers, say two wireless laptops in diff cities are to be synched?
FolderShare uses UPNP for that purpose, and one of the things I really like about FS is it’s high reliability/stability (aside of that two week outage a few months back
).
Another critical feature that FS has: it intelligently recognizes when two machines are on the same (LAN) network to transfer the data the fastest possible internally, not using the internet unnecessarily! That makes both your internet connection faster and of course the file transfer the fastest it can go. Does PowerFolder work this way as well?
I gotta know this before I start spending time giving it a try
Thanks
Really? I’ve never seen it do that, but it sure would be awesome if it actually did. I’ll have to pay attention next time I start a big share.
Just a quick update for those hitting the 10k limit in FolderShare and thinking of PowerFolder.
I’ve been playing with it for a couple of hours last night and this morning… so far I’m impressed.
The interface is obviously Java (not a fan of java) but that just mean’s its cross-platform which is always a good thing.
Starting up, it’s a little more complicated that FolderShare – but only because it’s a little bit more powerful!
At home it worked instantly withn my own LAN, although it soon said I was a power-user (100GB+ files) and I should upgrade to pro (which I was planning to do for the encryption eventually if good).
At work this morning I hit a problem, I could see my home machine online but couldn’t connect for transfer. In their forum there are a couple of guides, basically just followed their guide (just enabled port forwarding on my home router, signed up for a free dynDNS account that PowerFolder will update automatically with your current IP address) and it was fine.
The power of this is amazing, it takes very little CPU usage, but syncing over 100GB folder is taking up roughly 150MB of memory. If I wanted I can set backup/shares for friends and family for stuff they are allowed to see. If you had a group of friends or collegues who needed access to files you can set that up easily too.
Anyway – I’ve found the right tool for the job, but it’s ended up costing my £40 – but for lifetime updates and being theoretically unlimited its worth it.
Oh – one note – their terminology is a little strange and at first confusing. You have a username and password, but when you download the app and install it, you give it a nickname. This nickname is then what you would refer to as a Friend ID – so if you wanted to sync your office laptop with home machine (like me) you have to call one Law-PC, and one Law-Laptop…. I didn’t realise and got confused between “Law” and “Law” when trying to mirror folders! lol
[...] to cause me some issues. Major issues. Why? Because I’m a big dummy and have FolderShare as part of a production process at work. Yeah, I know that was dumb, but it has worked so well for so [...]
FolderShaer has been working great for me when sharing my files between two computers (office and home). But it never worked when I tried to share folders with others. If I sent invites to others, they always saw the message saying “all matches are busy” and could not open the files. Has anybody run into this problem?