I’m thinking about it though. Having backups in the cloud is the future. I see keeping your own backups currently as the equivalent of keeping your money in the mattress. Though trust in banks has taken a hit, most people feel much safer with their money in the bank and their data at home. That’s a measure of the infancy of data backup services.

I suspect that in 20 years, keeping terabytes of data in your home awaiting thieves and fires will seem as foolish as keeping your life savings under your bed.

Either that or bank failures will result in everyone investing in massive home vaults that will hold data and money… Long term, though, they’ll both end up in a similar place!

enough said.

That said, here’s what I can say from *my* experience with Allway.

Unlike Live Mesh, when Allway runs into a problem, there’s no data loss. The worst that happens is that if you move a file, it counts that as a delete and then a new file (of course), so if the delete comes first, and then the synch is interrupted, you’ll only have one copy. If you restart the synch, you’ll have both copies. That’s unavoidable and acceptable. The way Live Mesh does it is not.

And I regularly run synchs with tens of thousands of files (48,000 in my standard end of the day synch set) without a problem and my computer doesn’t really even slow down, and it doesn’t seem to have excessive memory usage (the machine has 2GB of memory). My guess is that you would need to be synching huge numbers of files on a machine without a lot of free memory.

Finally, they are not asking you to “organize your files in a certain way”. You can handle this either via organization (i.e. your programs are in the Program Files folder) or you can handle it by using filters so that folders that contain OS files or apps aren’t part of the synch (which you usually don’t want anyway). In any case, it just takes a little longer to set up the synch.

If you know an amazing Windows-based synch app, please add it to the comments.

I’m definitely not it after reading this from their site below (see faq question below).

Rather than have their programmer check for memory usage and avoid a crash they want you to organize your files a certain way to not crash.

I could live with a bug no problem, but the fact they thought this was acceptable enough to make it an FAQ is scary.

Allway FAQ – Question:
“doing a massive backup of XXX,000 files … crashes. Why?”

Allway FAQ – Answer:
“Our sophisticated sync algorithm … can result in the consumption of a lot of memory … Eventually, memory runs out and the program can’t continue. … try to keep files that might be modified (and so need to be synchronized) separate from those that are static (software distributions, program folders) and exclude the latter from synchronization.

Thanks for the interest in our synchronization software. We are glad that it is convenient for you and very pleased with this review.

Best regards,
Allway Sync Team.

With my best wishes, Dan.