FolderShare has done a bang-up job for a few years synchronizing my files amongst several computers. Recently I used it to collaborate with relatives to collect photos for my brother-in-law’s wedding. At home it does a lot of heavy lifting every day to synch (and, effectively, back up) work files, music and pictures between Katrin and myself. It does have a few pesky limitations, like a 10,000 file per folder limit in the basic version, but you can work around those fairly easily.
Today, though, I ran into an interesting hurdle: Foldershare has a ‘trash’ directory where it stuffs little ghost copies of every file you delete from a foldershare’d directory. This is a feature: you can always retrieve a deleted file if you want to. But it has a down side, too: so far, nobody has invented an infinitely large disk drive.
This morning, my 60GB C: drive, which has been hovering at fairly low disk space for the past few months, finally hit rock bottom. Windows Media complaining that it had no library space, Firefox crashing during security updates, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria. So I hauled out my super-disk-space-radar-gun — SpaceMonger — to find out who was hogging all the space. The nefarious culprit: FolderShare’s trash folder, clocking in at a massive 5.3 GB.
Yikes.
Gulp.
DELETE!
Hopefully Microsoft will release an update some time and add a feature to automatically limit the trash folder size.
I still heartily recommend FolderShare as a great solution for continuous file synch, but do keep this devilish little flaw in mind.
If you must know more:
- The official FolderShare FAQ on how to manage your trash folder
- An earlier MyOwnPirateRadio post about FolderShare and other tools I use to manage my data.
- A helpful article from someone else on how they use foldershare to manage their data. Discusses pros/cons.
