I came across this site recently, via an internal link naturally,

www.foldershare.com

It seems that Microsoft bought this company and I guess I missed the news of that one which I now regret because I could have done with this information recently.  Anyway, it's a method of sharing folders and files with friends, colleagues, relations, partners etc without the need to burn CD/DVDs.  To access this, just install the client, it seems that this is available for both MS Windows and Mac OSx, select the files/folders and send an email to the people you want to share them with.

I've just started playing with this at home and have already been able to:

• Access files from a remote PC across the internet
• Search content on the remote PC
• Synchronise data on PCs
• Share folder content with 3rd parties

Now, how useful could this be to students?  Just think, a student is producing his/her life's work on a PC/laptop.  One day, the PC/laptop is taken away on a permanent basis by a thief and the student loses all their work.  This happens every day of the year.  So with www.FolderShare.com, imagine if that student synchronises their folder with, for example, their parent's PC.  How great would that be?  That means that if the PC goes, it's just the physical assett and not the student's hard work and IP.

I've only just started experimenting with this, it's currently free :-) and I'll post more later.

Merry Christmas