Sure, there's other applications that have tried to solve problems like this before, but holy crap FolderShare nails it. Thanks Omar for the pointer!

I've been looking lately at getting some offline storage as my data situation is carrying with it a little too much "psychic weight." However, all these folks out there charging like $10 a month for a few gigs of offline storage? Please. Madness. 5 Gigs for $10 a month from XDrive? 5 Gigs? That'd barely cover my collection of Presentation PPTs.

FolderShare just nails it. Tiny download, 256-bit AES encryption, the files never touch their disks. That's freaking awesome.

I did the download, got a free account, and made a file on my desktop called "Shared Desktop." I'm all about using the Desktop as a work area. Then I clicked "Sync My Folders" and now I've got a folder on my desktop that is the same on my 3 machines. I can drop a file in there and it appears on my tablet.

I used it today when giving my MSDN Webcast. I just dropped my PPT in the folder at home and it was waiting for me at work.

Looks like there's three major classes of things that FolderShare can do:

• Sync n number of folders (Depending on what you pay. Free gets you 2.) to and unlimited number of machines. Amazing.
• Share a folder with another person. Much easier than FTP and the various other "get a big ass file to your friend" services that are out there. And really, when was the last time you were able to transfer a file using MSN Messenger? Puhlease.
• Here's the kicker: Access your files from any machine, over the web. Cool? Kind of, but the real shiny thing is that you can do distrubuted search of all your machine using either Google Desktop or MSN Search. Since I run both on all machines, I'm not sure which is the preferred provider, but it works regardless.

This new development has me totally rethinking my storage strategy. This is finally a technology that cements P2P in my world. It's profound and very Internet 2.0-like. And their pricing structure is brilliant. Finally a company that realizes that I'm ONE GUY with a LOT OF CRAP. Don't penalize me for being a technoweenie.

Ideas:

• Setup a Family Pictures folder that the whole family drops files from their digital cameras into. No one ever loses a picture if one hard drive crashes. Everyone sees photos as they are saved.
• Save Video files from Windows Media Center 2005 and share out video of a show that my mom may have missed. (Not sure if this works, but, we'll see.)
• Backup my Music files automatically to a NAS (Iomega NAS driver can apparently run FolderShare in their firmware. Wow. And I'd counted Iomega out of the game.)