I’ve been thinking of starting a new section wherein I can share some of the productive software tools that have been of tremendous use for me over the past few years. The software review section would cover these articles.
Be it any profession or activity we do, each one of us would have definitely come across situations wherein we need to share large volumes of files (large quantities and large sizes of files) with our friends or co-workers. Often this can become a hassle and a troublesome process, especially if you and your friend/coworker work together on a similar project or assignment and both of you put up with or exchange several files back and forth in the same folder. The hard and painful way would be to use a USB flash drive to exchange files back and forth. Other people opt for cloud-based file-sharing services like Dropbox or Box. For large scale work, using these cloud services could be a problem as these cloud-based file-sharing services do have storage limits and they often have a cap on the file sizes being shared. For instance, it’ll be a trouble to go ahead and share a file of size 5 Gb as an example. One solution that I’ve been using for the past several years is a product called Resilio Sync. It’s free for personal use and they have a paid version for professional use. This software uses peer-to-peer technology in a very effective way.
I shall demonstrate a scenario at home or work which almost all of us can relate to.
Let’s say Person A and Person B collaborate together on a project. They’re basically looking to have a common shared folder on each of their computers and if Person A puts a file into the folder, Person B should also get it. And any changes made by any person need to be synced with the other person as well. And this sharing process should have no limits in terms of the number of files being synced or the size of the file being shared. Now, here’s where Resilio Sync can be of immense use for you!
First, Person A and Person B each have to download and install Resilio Sync. It’s a nifty little app that sits in your system tray. It’s available for Mac and PC as well. Person A can create a folder in his / her computer and add that folder to the Resilio Main Window. Once it’s added, on right-clicking that folder, Person A would get an encrypted sharing key. It’s a mix of letters and numbers. Person A has to send this to Person B. On the other side, Person B, after installing Resilio has to add this key to the main window and select a folder to be assigned to it. That’s all.
Now, Person A and Person B have corresponding folders in each of their computers that sync with each other. There is no limitation on the size of the file or the number of files that can be synced.
This program has been of good use for me for the past several years and I thought of sharing it here may that it might be of some use for all of you in some way or the other.