Need folder sync alternate to Windows Live Mesh

Can you or Jason McCullough find the asshat that decided not to support Folder Sync in Skydrive and punch him in the junk for me? I'd owe ya a few beers.

Put it on YouTube and I'll chip in too.

Any update on Operation Nad Punch, Jason McCullough or Guido Jones?

In other news, I got an invite to AeroFS. In the bad news, it's like early Dropbox in its "You can only sync stuff inside the AeroFS folder."

Supposedly, they're working on adding external folder support as we speak, but there's no ETA on that. Keeping my fingers crossed it'll be soon, because the program is basically useless to me without it. I'm not moving all my folders another folder level deep if I don't have to.

What is synctoy run periodically through task scheduler missing, that WLM offered?

The fact that Synctoy won't work between computers in remote locations?
The fact Synctoy doesn't function in realtime?
The fact that Synctoy doesn't offer a universal GUI for syncing multiple folders easily?

Uh...everything.

I went ahead and jumped on the beta pricing for Cubby. $50 a year seems okay for me for 100GB of cloud backup and unlimited syncing. It's been working very well for me syncing stuff to various PCs in various configurations.

Ah... didn't realize this part. Guess that is a non-starter.

Okay, one huge issue with Cloud Station sync -- you can't set a cap on bandwidth, so when I enabled it on my remote machine it immediately turned around and saturated my (meager) upstream bandwidth to the point I couldn't even Web surf. Every byte was being used by Cloud Station. That's a fairly significant oversight (that should be easy for them to fix too -- another complaint people have is that it uses a hardcoded port you can't change, vs. tunnelling through 20/443/80/8080).

What happens when the beta price expires? Are you OK with $72 a year for that?

Me, I won't pay a cent for folder sync because I don't need the cloud portion.

According to the email I got, if you get the beta pricing, you keep the beta pricing going forward unless you cancel. If they don't let me keep it, $72 is still cheaper than Dropbox's $99.

But like I said, I'm also doing it for the cloud backup, because I don't currently have any and this is a thousand percent easier that setting up a local backup solution for each PC I have.

I'm pretty sure you're making up stuff just to mess with us. A what server for your what host on your what box?

And I just found my A Bridge Too Far. ;)

Operation I like my job has precedence, sorry

SyncToy + Hamachi? haven't tried it myself.

i'm still really liking AeroFS.

Install Skydrive and mount as folder. You can also fiddle around with junction points.

You're welcome.

We must all make sacrifices, for the greater good.

Why bother? It's only 7GB of storage. My free Dropbox has 10GB thanks to all the referral links I've sent out.

Too much effort, and at that point, it's not network neutral. If I've got three computers syncing files, and one is a laptop, and I take that laptop offsite to a location that's not in the VPN loop, and I make changes to those files, with Mesh, they'd instantly be sync'd. If my laptop was lost or destroyed at that point, no worries, I have my files up to date at my home and office thanks to Mesh.

Synctoy isn't realtime, nor location agnostic, so it's just not a workable replacement.

My Skydrive has 25GB for free because I joined early and later clicked a button.

Lucky bastard.

Still, not remotely enough - I was using Mesh to sync 500GB of data between home and work.

Just gonna wait patiently for AeroFS to add multi-folder support. Apparantly there's a hack where you can create a junction in the AeroFS folder to the folder you want to sync, but I don't have the stomach for hacks. Hopefully they'll get that feature added before Mesh bites the dust in February.

Oh I'm not saying it's enough. These cloud services are useless to me, the things I want to sync are way beyond the storage offered. Even if it wasn't, who the hell has upstream bandwidth that makes this a reasonable proposition? I already had to do it once for my online backup and once is enough.

Agreed, Quitch. One thing I loved about Mesh was that I could transfer the files to the other computer my own way, and then tell Mesh which folders to sync, and it went through and compared folders and realized they were the same and bam - Instant synchronicity.

They really had a functional and reliable deduplication method too, because I never noticed any big bandwidth sucks when I'd make changes to a 4GB file in the Meshed folders.

Don't worry, I'm sure all the devs got laid off anyway

this tool (Link Shell Extension) makes things like Junctions a breeze. also, yes, AeroFS works with Junctions. it isn't a hack, it's just how the filesystem works.

What's bad about that? I mean obviously you should disable the browser plugins, but is there some other issue you have with it?

Sure, but it's a vector almost exclusively hit via the browser.

Yeah, disable the browser plugin and Java away.

If you're using Chrome (and, I think, Firefox these days), it'll ask you before it allows a webpage to launch a Java app anyway.

Anyway, I revived this thread so that I could second @Lum's recommendation of SparkleShare. If you're not familiar with Git, there's a bit of a learning curve to getting it going. Just a bit though - the developer has a script called Dazzle that takes care of the heavy lifting for you if you have access to a Linux server and if not, you could always pay Github or its ilk for private repos.

I'm using it to silently sync my Documents, Photos and a directory that has stuff like putty.exe, pageant.exe etc. and lives in my %PATH%.

Moving the troops to Office365 this week, E3 package.

Only issue we've really encountered is that the folks like to have, you know, shortcuts on their desktop to their shared files. It all seemed well and good: You can construct shortcuts that directly reference the Shared Documents folder on the Team Site you've set up on Sharepoint Online, or you can use the "Open In Explorer" link off of the Team Site website, and then save a shortcut from there. Easy Peasy.

Until 2 hours of inactivity pass. Then, the "security tile" in the background becomes inaccurate, and any attempts to access the shortcut fail in an "Access Denied" message (or some variant). Only way to get it back is to log into the Team Site website and access the Shared Documents folder, and then restart the WebClient service. I'm 2 steps away from finishing off a Powershell script that will do that for a user if they see that happen.

It boggles the mind that Skydrive, a free product from MS, handles this so much better than Sharepoint Online. *sigh*

If you're still looking, SugarSync (a DropBox-alike) just announced unlimited storage for $55/month.

How is $55 monthly even remotely a reasonable solution? Jesus, that's pricey.

Here, Bitcasa just went unlimited storage for $100 annually, or $70 for a limited time.

https://www.bitcasa.com/press/bitcasa-comes-out-of-beta/

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for someone to pick up the slack from Mesh. Only 8 days left until Mesh shits the bed.

Like any storage solution, backup, backup, backup. The cloud doesn't make things any more reliable, and anyone hoping it does is hoping for the wrong things.

No argument there.