Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Live Sync/Foldershare Service Ending March 31st, 2011

"You're receiving this message because you installed Windows Live Sync (previously known as FolderShare) for Windows or Mac. On March 31, 2011, Windows Live Sync will stop working. After March 31, this program will no longer sync your files between your computers and you won't be able to access your files remotely from sync.live.com. Please read below for actions we recommend you take. With the new release of Windows Live services, we've made a series of changes and improvements across the products. We realize they will have an impact on you and we want to make that as easy as possible for you. We thank you for your continued support of Windows Live."

Like it or not, using the above-mentioned products is going to be impossible by March 2011. It's nice that the team is leaving the service in place that long; my hope is that by the time March 2011 rolls around, there will be another update for Live Mesh that will make it pain-free to use. The final release was better than the beta in terms of performance, but not by much - I still routinely get Windows Defender start failures on a reboot, and if I stop Live Mesh from starting at reboot I get no such errors. Large libraries can grind even a powerful system to a halt for hours - or days - and on the flip side, even relatively small updates (100 files, 500 MB) can take hours.

Is anyone aware of a similar sync program? The catch I've seen is that many of them - SugarSync, Dropbox - place things in the cloud as well as local PCs. All I want is the data on my PCs, not in the cloud. I want to push around 77 GB worth of data, but I don't want any of it in the cloud. Ideas?