Windows Live Sync arrives as FolderShare fades away
We knew that Windows Live Sync was on the way since Microsoft announced last month that it would replace FolderShare with the new Live service. LiveSide.net says that today’s the day you can get your first look at Live Sync and decide for yourself if and how it competes with Live Mesh… also by Microsoft.
Live Sync supports Windows and Mac devices so you can synchronize files and data between your multiple machines. How much synching can you do? Up to 20 folders and each folder can hold 20,000 files. Live Sync also integration with the Recycle Bin; I’ll have check and see exactly how that works across platforms. If you’re interested, you can grab the software here and start synching your data. Current FolderShare users should be prompted to upgrade to Live Sync. Don’t worry, according to the FAQ’s, you won’t lose any FolderShare data and your data libraries will automatically be rebuilt on the Live servers.
Update: The Live Sync team issued a blog comment addressing the application issues around 8:30pm ET. "Hi Sync friends. We’ve found a problem that is causing sign-into take longer than expected and in some cases causing sign-in to fail.We’re actively working on fixing this problem and expect to have itfixed for most of our users very soon. We are sorry for theinconvenience. – The Sync Team
I am really happy with Syncplicity. It just works and provides a great user experience. Yes, it is not free, but it does offer rock solid super fast performance.
The worst thing about all Microsoft Live products is the horrible interface design. I cannot believe how they manage to make a Microsoft product look so out of place in the Windows interface
What size and no of files limitations does livemesh have in comparison? Is anyone sync’ing their whole drive ie 10’s GBs?
On my mac, no matter what I do, when I open Live Sync it says it is out of date. Then it promptly closes. I’ve re-downloaded it about 6 times thus far.
Any ideas?
Yep, not working on my Mac either, and frankly I am not thrilled with the update on the Windows side. I haven’t had to mess with foldershare for years, it just runs no problems. Now it keeps trying to open Windows Live Messages – which I don’t use and I am sure it’ll try and force the issue.
They are going to mess with it and now the door is open to go try other products.
Yep, not working on my Mac either, and frankly I am not thrilled with the update on the Windows side. I haven’t had to mess with foldershare for years, it just runs no problems. Now it keeps trying to open Windows Live Messages – which I don’t use and I am sure it’ll try and force the issue.
They are going to mess with it and now the door is open to go try other products.
Works great on my Vaio! I love it. I can’t wait to see how Mesh and WL Sync unfold in the next year.
I installed it on my MacBook this afternoon. It worked for a while and then started giving me the out-of-date message. I’ll give it a day or two and then maybe think about going back to Live Mesh. I really don’t look forward to that considering the number of files that were eaten by it last time around.
I have been happily using FolderShare on numerous Vista, XP, and Mac computers (since the upgrade supported Vista). It just worked.
Now, all of a sudden, MS has to force us to migrate to a new tool, buggy tool. Right out of the box it is broken. The windows machines took forever to get through to the servers to register after the upgrade. Right in the middle of my work day. And the Mac software still doesn’t work. Completely broken. Thanks, Microsoft. Good job.
Can these guys get anything right? I have an idea – how about testing the software before you boot everyone off of the old system and onto a broken new one.
Syncplicity is for windows only. Does anyone know of a decent replacement???
Thanks.
I’m not sure where this sits compared with Live Mesh. They both look to offer the same capabilities.
Terry TIGNER: I find SugarSync to work really well and it’s cross-platform also. DropBox is my other fave.
Post from MSFT on the Mac client:
Hi,
We’ve found a problem that is causing sign-in to take longer than expected
and in some cases causing sign-in to fail. We’ve isolated the problem to a
bug in our Mac client.
In order to prevent this issue from affecting all users we are temporarily
blocking the Mac clients from connecting to the service. So for the time
being, Mac users will see an error stating that their version is too old.
This is expected and once we have the problem fixed we will allow the Mac
clients to connect to Sync again. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks,
Francisco
–
Francisco Garcia-Ascanio
Windows Live Sync
Program Manager
The Mac client is now working!
Yea!
Request to Live Sync team for future reference:
If you have to disable an application for even a short period – please communicate it to your customers! I spent way too much time trying to repeatedly download the mac client and re-installing it time and again yesterday trying to fix this problem. A simple message from your team stating that it was “on hold” for a short while and was “disabled” temporarily would have saved me some precious time.
Customer Service. It’s not just an idea. Think about it.
Thanks for listening.
I was not looking forward to the switch, but the message that my FolderShare client was too old and would no longer work hit me late last night on my XP desktop. So I did the Live Sync upgrade with trepidation, but apart from a short glitch with signing in, so far so good. All my FolderShare files and folders showed up in due course on the Live Sync web page.
I haven’t turned on Vista-running Tablet PC yet though!