I try out a lot of applications, and there are a bunch that I use all the time to make my computer life easier. Some stand out more than others, but one that I’ve been using for about a year, almost without thinking about it, is FolderShare. You point FolderShare to a folder you’d like to keep synced up on multiple machines, and if FolderShare is installed on those machines, it just does it. It’s incredible.
(I should point out that a lot of solutions like this ask you to install an additional drive, or use some software to emulate a disk that you can write to, and the data’s actually sent to a central server. FolderShare just gets pointed at a folder you already have, and as far as I can tell, no extra copies are made on any other servers, just the peers you tell it to sync to. So that’s a level of complexity you don’t have to concern yourself with.)
I started out thinking that this would be a great way to use one installation of Firefox on my home PC, work PC, and laptop, but if you forget to shut down Firefox on one, you can’t use it on the others, because of the way it locks up files that are in use. (That’s one case in which it does not “just work”: if you’re trying to delete a file that’s in use on another machine, it can get confused, but mostly it elegantly avoids doing anything that might cause problems. That’s okay.)
I was able to get one copy of Miranda into a shared folder, but it’s got similar issues, so I scrapped that.
PWSafe, my favorite password storing app, works perfectly. I now have pretty much random passwords for most of my important logins, and the file where I keep them follows me around. (I think if you made changes to a safe, and didn’t close the app, and tried to run it somewhere else, you might get issues, but I try to shut that program down pretty quickly.)
It is technically a file sharing app, and that’s what it does best. I have an mp3 directory in my shared directory, and I stash my downloads there, whichever machine I’m on, so I can process them later on my main machine with iTunes. (They try to tell you that you could keep your whole MP3 collection in there, but I’m not sure how well that would work.)
I also have synced up a couple of my poker log directories, so hands I play on the laptop still get processed by PokerTracker. Pretty handy.
I suppose the killer thing to do with it would be backup of documents, photos or mp3s, where, even if you have no intent of ever using the files on another machine, at least there’s another hard drive in the world that this content is stored on, just in case. (Although, in my experience, most data loss is a result of human error, and FolderShare will happily distribute the damage you do to your filesystem across all the other versions of it.)
I don’t even think about it anymore. If I will want a file on my laptop, workstation, or home PC the next time I sit down with it, I just store it in my shared directory. It’s way more elegant than mailing stuff to yourself (no matter how great Gmail is), and it just works. (Have I mentioned it just works?)
