The Best Cross Platform Folder Share Service?

There are so many "hard drive in the sky" services these days that I honestly can’t bring myself to wade through all of them and find one I like.

Here’s my application. I’ve now moved back to Windows in the office (xobni/outlook being the driver) and still using MacBook Pro for home/on the road.

I want a folder share service to share one folder (my documents of course) between both machines and also into the cloud.

I’ll take any and all the advice I can get but I’d love to hear from people who are doing exactly this.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Keith Teare

    omnidrive is god. dotmac isn’t bad either (apples own service)

  2. charlie crystle

    Comments back up.We use FilesAnywhere, but I’d also look at Carbonite.charlie crystlehttp://www.missionresearch….

  3. Simon Appleton

    Foldershare works well between N machines and has a mac and PC client, but doesn’t sync to the cloud (unless you run a server somewhere with the client on it).(ah, had never encountered the 10,000 file limitation, which is odd given my music library!)

  4. Rich

    Carbonite does not act as a folder share service. Last time I checked you weren’t able to access individual files from a web space. I have used it though and it seems to be reliable but Mozy is getting more attention lately and they have one feature in my opinion that give them an edge – they keep a few revs of a backed up file whereas Carbonite just keeps the last one.

  5. Derek

    If you are up for a little hacking, I’ve made sshfs work nicely for myself: http://fuse.sourceforge.net…Not sure it works on the mac, but it should.

  6. fewquid

    I’d second Omnidrive. I didn’t thrash it hard, but I did use it to bounce between a MacBook and an XP Laptop and it worked well.

  7. Mitch Rubin

    Fred, I had the same needs and searched for a few months until I found a solution that I would highly recommend. I use Amazon’s S3 storage with the Jungle Disk utility – http://www.jungledisk.com. Jungle Disk is a lightweight front end to Amazon’s S3 API and runs as a webdav server. In non-tech speak it is a utility that allows you to map a network drive to Amazon’s S3 storage in the cloud. There is a client for both Mac & Windows and works great with my macbook and windows machine in the office. The end result is the equivalent of a local hard drive that stores your data in the cloud. Amazon charges ¢ 15 per gig per month and Jungle Disk’s introductory pricing is $20.

  8. Luke

    Box.net has nice sharing features and integrates well with blogs.

  9. markslater

    Fred – here is my listPhotos – Flickrfiles (music/office/email) – box.netvideo – youtubeProject management – Basecamp (awsome)

  10. Ethan Bauley

    box.net is great; easy sharing, great UI, and you can send files via email attachment

  11. Steve Rubel

    I use Box.net as well as .Mac’s iDisk. I like the former because there’s a mobile client and Zoho/Office integration.

  12. Shivering Timbers

    Foldershare.Used to be an independent company, now part of Microsoft. I can’t say I’m impressed with what Microsoft has done with it (I would charitably describe it as benign neglect), but the software works really really well.It’s peer-to-peer folder synchronization which runs transparently in the background. I use it to keep files synced up between about a half-dozen machines (both personal and business), and it Just Works. It’s also free.The downside is that you’re limited to 10,000 files per folder tree, and something like 10 trees. So this is not for cloning your entire hard drive (or even your entire home directory), but it’s perfect for keeping business documents, marketing material, presentations, etc., up to date.

    1. fredwilson

      is it cross platform?

    2. Wayninho

      I second Shivering Timbers comments on Foldershare. I use it to keep my business files synched between my work machine and my Macbook for home/travel. Works great for me.

  13. Cliff

    The http://www.memeo.com/ products are good. I have been using them for auto backups for 2 years and it works transparently

  14. Jonathan

    Om did a post on this recently (http://gigaom.com/2007/09/1… citing a study done by the folks over at Pingdom (http://royal.pingdom.com/?p… who measured the downtime of about 15 of the “drive in the sky” services. Worth a quick read.I have been using both Mozy and S3 via JungleDisk lately.

    1. Jonathan

      I should add that both are cross platform. Also, regarding Foldershare discussed above, it works great. I used it for a year or two on my PC at work and my Macs at home. There were some hiccups I encountered when mapping the default folders for pictures and music files between the Mac and PC but they were resolved without much difficulty. I stopped using it for fear that Microsoft would stop supporting the Mac client (I don’t think it has been updated since they purchased the company).

  15. Greg

    Please let us know what you go with and how it works out.

    1. Charlie

      Third Foldershare…. just works…. sync local files to other machines… plus, login to the site if you need to pull down a file in another location.

  16. Jonathan Marcus

    Microsoft’s Foldershare is very good. I have used it for about a year. Customer support would be nice and something that I would be willing to pay for.

  17. BloggerOfTheWeb

    Willing to try out.Cheers,BloggerOfTheWebhttp://www.blogrush.com/r16…

  18. scottythebody

    I have been looking for the same thing, and the above list makes me really want to try the S3 stuff! Need to figure out if I can get that going on or not.I would say stay away from .Mac. I love Apple stuff, but .Mac is total crap. It has let me down more than it has helped me, it has erased my address book not once, but twice, I get mysterious “sync errors” every day, and the Windows support for iDisk sucks big time. I don’t use Windows often, but when I do, I want to be able to get to my stuff. Beyond that, the capacity limits on .Mac are very 1990s to me. Apple really needs to step it up. For $99/year, it’s not even a very good value, although I do appreciate very much its integration with iMovie and iWeb for single-click upload of video podcasts that automatically put baby videos into my mama’s iTunes!

  19. Cheyne

    I use Omnidrive for small things like documents, some photos and backups of contacts etc. It works well, creating a virtual drive on the PC/MAC so its *almost* as if you are are using a regular local folder. It is quite slow to sync though, but it’s not too bad.

  20. Howard Greenstein

    I’ll third or twelth Foldershare. I use it on 2 macs and a PC. Happy with it. Sorry that MSFT doesn’t even promote it.

  21. Howard Greenstein

    To share stuff into the cloud, I am using Amazon’s S3, via Bandwagon S3 and Jungle Disk.Bandwagon (mac only) copies my entire iTunes as a backup to S3. It took a few days to copy all 18GB ( I didn’t copy movies and TV shows yet, only music) but now when I buy new stuff, it copies it up and keeps it in sync. Jungle disk allows me to mount S3 like a drive a drag stuff. have my iPhotos there.

  22. Joe Drumgooole

    You could take a look at our service which is launching in October see http://putplace.com for details.