Foldershare - real-time backup made easy

MCS is like most consulting organisations in that as a consultant, you are working on customer sites a lot of the time. A downside of this is that you don't get to fully avail of "corporate" solutions such as folder redirection, or the use of home drives - meaning most of your data is on your laptop. Obviously, loss of this data means you are seriously inconvenienced. A few years ago I had my laptop stolen and lost about 3 weeks of effort, both work in progress plus not actually being able to do my job due to lack of access to historical info that I needed.

We're pretty well off in MCS in that we have a lot of remote connectivity options, such as a good VPN solution, Smartphones supplied as standard kit, access to LOB applications hosted in an extranet via HTTPS, and increasing exposure of our Sharepoint sites via HTTPS and certificate authentication. But it is still not the same as being on the corporate LAN.

My solution was to back up to a USB drive weekly, and to sync my "my documents" folder with a server whenever I remembered to do so whilst back in the office. This was a pretty mundane activity, and consequently happened quite infrequently :-)

I got hold of a Media Center PC a couple of months ago, and soon it began to wish that I could use it for work purposes instead of relying solely on the laptop. Whilst investigating options I came across foldershare (www.foldershare.com) - which provides a very cool solution. It is basically peer-to-peer replication, managed by a central web service. You install the client (XP, Vista or MAC), tell it which folders to sync to which machines, and the software manages the replication for you in realtime over the internet. I use this to sync my "my documents" folder & my IE favourites between my laptop and the PC in my office at home. This gives me an offsite backup which is constantly updated, plus the ability to work on any machine and access all the information I need to. I wish I had used this years ago, would have definitely made my life easier. Check it out...