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

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!

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.

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

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!!

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.