Anyone who works on multiple computers knows how tough it can get to manually share or synchronize files and folders between different computers. The problem gets worse if you maintain a mix of Windows and Mac machines.

For instance, you could have photos and songs on the home computer, documents & presentations are stored on the Office computer but you often need to access them from the home computer especially on days when you are working from home. That’s not all, you also carry a laptop when travelling and wish you had access to both entertainment stuff and work related data that’s currently scattered across different computers.

One of the options is to carry your data (photos, music, documents, videos, etc) on an external hard-drive, USB stick or burn it to a CD / DVD. But is it a practical approach when you have dozens of folders containing hundreds of files.

Assuming that all you computers (that need to share data) are connected to the internet, a neat and painless solution is FolderShare, a free software utility from Microsoft that works on Windows as well as Mac.

Here’s how FolderShare works – you install this small program on each of the computers that need to share or access data from other computers. You then select files / folders that are to be shared – it could your MyDocuments folder, iTunes Music, Browser Bookmarks, PDF collection or anything else.

FolderShare runs in the background (as a taskbar icon) and synchronizes files over the Internet.

As an example, if you download a Word document from the Office computer to your Home computer for editing, FolderShare will automatically replace the old copy on the Office computer with the new edited version. Similarly if you transfer new pictures from the digital camera to the home computer, they’ll be instantly available on your office computers and laptop provided they are connected to the web.

Other than sync, FolderShare can also be used to download files in shared folders from any computer remotely via the web browser. There are absolutely no limitations expect that the maximum size of individual files should not exceed 2 GB.