by alec on December 7, 2008
Microsoft sent mail to Foldershare users late in November to let them know that an upgrade was finally coming. Foldershare is the folder synchronization tool acquired from ByteTaxi in 2005, and except for minor updates, it has remained mostly unchanged since then. In December, however, it will be renamed Windows Live Sync, and finally integrated with the rest of the Windows Live universe.
Frankly, I’m confused, and I’m not alone. I’m currently using both Foldershare and Live Mesh and have been actively working toward a complete cut over of my Foldershare installation to Mesh. Mesh is a complete superset of the Foldershare functionality, with the added ability for users to access PC’s remotely, store files in the cloud and a set of platform APIs.
Can someone shed some light on Microsoft’s confusing synchronization story, please?
It's been a whacky hardware week here, and I'm still not done digging out of the mess.
Sunday my desktop PC at home experienced a catastrophe. The motherboard or power supply (still don't know which) died.
Monday night, I installed Safari for Windows on my laptop in the Toronto airport lounge. It was the last straw for my aging HP TC1100 tablet PC. Already flaky, the PC folded up and died due to something in the way that Safari uses video. So, Tuesday I set about rebuilding it.
Tuesday night I had the bright idea of using the PC I keep in my basement as an Asterisk server as a temporary replacement for my desktop PC while having the desktop PC serviced. Janice has been complaining for a while that her PC needs a rebuild (kids downloading stuff, etc), and the Asterisk box is a nice shiny AMD Sempron 3200. Maybe I can kill two birds with one stone, I reasoned. I'll format the Asterisk box to Windows, use it myself until my desktop is fixed, and then pass it on to her, take her old PC (a 1.8 Ghz Athlon) and turn it into the Asterisk box. Down to the basement I went, and… as hard as this is to fathom… I knocked the Asterisk box on it's side, while it was running (it was stacked on another PC). I've never heard a sound like that from a hard drive before…
A replacement 200G SATA hard drive was $99 at Staples. Copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 were purchased, and installed. Then I parked the PC at my desk while working on the laptop.
This morning most of the files are in the right places, and most of the PC's (except for the desktop that kacked on Sunday) are up and running again. Thanks to Foldershare (Microsoft's file synchronizing solution) I had nearly current backups of everything. I did end up wasting a good chunk of Wednesday recreating iotum's financial modelling spreadsheet, because it somehow hadn't been synchronized to my backup server, but all in all the data seems to have survived and been moved into the right places.
Now on to the corrupt WordPress installation on my blog.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=e7b3cf56-08c0-45d4-be35-fd01480a566f)
