Foldershare is a handy tool that keeps several PC’s in sync – most of the time, when it works. Of course sometimes it goes down, defying it’s new Windows Live moniker. 
Unlike the previous, week-long outage, this one was just a few hours, but even now as it recovers, users can’t log in:
Outages are inevitable, but the repeated incidents made me realize that Foldershare has a design glitch: it’s dependence on logging in to a web server for no good reason.
- Yes, I understand setup, customization is all through the Web.
- However, once set up, the need to change configuration is rare, the whole idea in Foldershare is that it just runs in the background with the users barely noticing it even exists. It does NOT sync / upload actual data to the Web server, all synchronization is strictly P2P. In fact one of the setup options is to define whether you allow remote P2P sync to occur through the Net, or strictly on your LAN, behind the firewall.
Why on earth my Foldershare clients on 3 computers have to sign in to the Web to be able to carry out behind-the-firewall synchronization is beyond me. Could the not cache the latest config locally, and use it whenever log-in fails?
Of course I have previously speculated that Microsoft should tie Foldershare and Skydrive, offering both PC sync and Web backup, in which case logging in becomes a reasonable requirement. But even then, local sync should be available as a fall-back option for outages.
Update (2/13): A day later Foldershare clients still can’t log in. Perhaps it’s time to change “the next couple of hours” to “the next couple of days“. 
your configuration data. And that’s where the process often dies. So far it hasn’t bothered me though, sometimes Foldershare could not log in, but I could safely rely on it getting through in a few hours and catching up with synchronization.
November 12, 2007
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