Digital Home Thoughts: The Official Word on FolderShare Becoming Windows Live Sync

"We want to let you know what's next for FolderShare, and to make you aware of some important upcoming changes. In December, we will release a new product called Windows Live Sync. You can think of it as FolderShare 2.0...A huge part of Sync's success story depends on FolderShare users like you. When Sync releases, FolderShare goes into retirement. That means your FolderShare software will stop working and will ask you to upgrade to Sync. Once you do, Sync will automatically rebuild your personal folders. We expect a lot of new users when Sync is released, so if you can't sign in right away, please give it a little time."

Well, we knew this was coming, but I was hoping for something a bit more interesting with this all-new version now dubbed Live Sync. Here are the features they listed:

• More folders and files - sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each.
• Integration with Windows Live ID - no more extra sign-in stuff to remember.
• Integration with the Recyle Bin - no more separate Trash folder to fiddle with.
• New client versions for both Windows and Mac.
• Unicode support - sync files in other languages.

Moving to Windows Live ID is nice, and the integration with the Recycle Bin is also very slick - but because I was already a professional user (migrated over from the Byte Taxi days) I already had the 20,000 files per library limit. This is huge news for all the people who were previously limited to 10,000 files. So what am I complaining about? Well, I have just over 21,000 files in my Pictures folder, and I've been using FolderShare to sync that folder. You'd think it wouldn't have worked once I broke past 20K, but it did...and now I'm rather scared that it will stop working. I was really hoping that by the time they launched this new service they'd have a professional offering ready to go - because this is certainly something I'm willing to pay for.

There's also the prevailing question of Live Mesh - how long can the Windows Live team have two products that are nearly identical?