I was a foldershare user before it was purchased by Microsoft. Back in those days foldershare was a paid service and I had a professional licence for it. When Microsoft brought it they refunded my subscription and made it a free service. I’ve been a advocate of foldershare and for years it’s worked seamlessly. However, recently microsoft re-branded it as live sync and forced users to change the software running it. My experience of this has been poor. Initially the live sync software for mac would not work; my vista PC did install ok but my PC running XP never did install the product. As I had made the syncronzing across my machines part of my backup routine this situation was intolerable so I’ve dumped live sync and microsoft have driven me a little further from them as contenders in the emerging cloud computing model.
Thanks to Kevin Purdy over at lifehacker I became aware of dropbox and i’ve installed it on my machines. Initially I’ve replicated all of my photos across machines, but over the next few days I shall be doing the same with with my backups and documents. I’ve purchased an annual subscription which for $99 gives me 50gb of storage. In addition to syncronising, dropbox stores my files online on an Amazon S3 server so I have a high level of confidence that its safe and secure. Foldershare never offered online storage.
