FolderShare at Chastney Towers

JK has written an article on the way that he uses FolderShare to synchronise a number of devices giving him the flexibility to pickup the device that he thinks will be appropriate and still have access to all of the data.

FolderShare has become so much a part of the Chastney family working process that I had forgotten about it – which is a great thing for a piece of software.

In the Chastney’s family household there are three family devices. There are other devices, but the family is limited to three. We don’t use FolderShare in the same way as JK though. Each device has its own FolderShare account because it’s used primarily by a different person. Having different accounts allows us to have different data go to different places, in a kind of matrix.

• Sue primarily uses the PC in the study downstairs. She stores nearly everything in here ‘My Documents’ directory, with a few things going into ‘Shared’. Her ‘My Documents’ is backed-up to the Family Media Center (which I primarily use). Her ‘My Documents’ is stored in a sub-directory of a directory called ‘backup’ on one of the drives.
• Jonathan has his own laptop. He puts everything into ‘My Documents’ except his music which goes into ‘Shared’. All of his music is ripped from CD, so we don’t back that up at all. His ‘My Documents’ goes into another sub-directory of ‘backup’ on the Media Center PC.
• My ‘My Documents’ on the the Family Media Center is replicated to Sue’s PC in the study downstairs.
• Family stuff, such as pictures are replicated between the ‘Shared Documents’ folders on the Media Center PC and the PC in the Study Downstairs.

Because Foldershare also has a ‘trash’ concept nothing that is deleted actually gets deleted from everywhere and we could recover it if we wanted to. I don’t use FolderShare as the only backup, but it does mean that I don’t do back-up that often. It all just happens and none of us think anything about it.

Actually, I say I had forgotten FolderShare but that was until this Sunday when I realised that I had got to church and forgotten to copy the Sermon presentation for the day onto my memory stick. What to do, well actually it’s really, really simple. Log-on to FolderShare access the files on my computer, download them. Worked a treat. Actually it worked so well I’m not sure I will copy stuff onto my memory stick ever again (actually I will because I’m paranoid about such things but I will at least do so knowing there is a back-up plan).

Tags: Microsoft,FolderShare