Exchanging Files on the Road: SugarSync OK for Workgroups, Flawed on the Mac

Our team is significantly virtual. This means that pretty much all the time we are “on the road” (at least as far as file-sharing is concerned.)

Over the years we’ve tried numerous schemes that would enable us to work on documents at the same time (or at least share them without a lot of e-mail back and forth.) Apple’s iDisk showed great promise, and we have used it in a number of projects, but it has several significant flaws. The main issue with the iDisk has been that it seems to make many of our machines lockup at inopportune moments. Another is the latency problem. It seems whenever we want to access an important file we end up with a spinning beach ball that can last for several minutes.

One workaround for the latency problem is to arrange for the iDisk to sync to a local version on your hard drive. This solves one problem, but regrettably it forces you to keep an entire copy of the iDisk on your hard drive which can take up hundreds of gigabytes.

We were intrigued by SugarSync and decided to give it a try. The good news is that indeed, it has almost entirely replaced the iDisk as our file sharing platform. With SugarSync everyone possesses a copy of a shared folder on their hard drive locally. Via a web service these folders are synchronized as items within them change. It’s really a nice service in that when you put a new document into a folder or subfolder within the shared items directory, it almost immediately propagates out to the folders on the shared drives of your partners. It also does a reasonably good job of versioning files that may be open by multiple people at the same time.

This means you can be on an airplane and access a shared folder and work on files that will rapidly be synchronized to other peoples hard drives — when you can get a web connection that is…

The problem for Mac users is that not all of a files contents is actually synchronized. What’s missing is the data contained in an area called the “resource fork.” The resource fork contains a bunch of really cool stuff, such as comments, labels, and other meta information accessible in the “get info” dialog.

When I originally set up our shared folder, I assigned files to people using comments and prioritized them using labels. All of these meta items were stripped out when synchronized with other people’s folders. Sigh.

My feeling is that if and when these features are added, we’ll have an extremely compelling tool for Mac users in a workgroup. Currently it’s a nice alternative to the iDisk, but for many who rely on comments etc, it’s no solution.