Today's useful software: Foldershare

[sbisson]

I had a couple of hours to kill yesterday afternoon, between meetings, so I sat down in a Starbucks to do some work. Unfortunately the files I needed were on a PC at home, and working with a VPN over GPRS is tedious to say the least...

No need to worry - I'd left the PC on and running Foldershare's satellite - so I could fire up a browser session, connect to my account on their web site, and copy the files I needed onto my PC. I was able to get what I wanted written, and still have time for a venti chai latte and some lemon ginger cake...

Foldershare used to be a pay for service, but after Microsoft bought it, it switched to free. There are OS X and Windows clients, so you can copy between OSes happily - and you can have more than one PC associated to your account. You can use it to automatically sync files between machines, but I'm sticking with just using it as a low bandwidth VPN solution.

A useful widget.

...and no spyware or adware either

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

SSH and the like tunnel other protocols - which adds a considerable overhead over narrow bandwidth links. They're also optimised for wired connections - large packet sizes and low latency.

More lightweight solutions don't tunnel, don't add overhead, and tend to be designed to work for smaller packet sizes and higher latencies.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Unfortunately, since FolderShare provide no details on their protocol, it isn't clear what the overheads in their protocol are, nor whether it makes specific provision for mobile users.

[mdlbear]

ssh doesn't "tunnel" data transfers; it uses exactly the same SSL encryption that a web browser does, and probably with less overhead because it's not dealing with RFC822 headers, cookies, and the like. And it uses zlib for compression. Of course, I don't know what else is going on with Foldershare, since it's proprietary. They might be doing something like rsync, which would help with synchronizing large files with small changes, but probably not otherwise.