How to use Diskstation as a mail server

What’s changed?
The basic functionality hasn’t really changed.

As with Foldershare before it, Windows Live Sync is free and mostly used to synchronise files held in folders on a home or office PC with those on a notebook used when travelling.

Any changes made while out and about will be automatically applied to the desktop PC and vice versa, with manual updates available.

There are, however, some significant enhancements.

With Foldershare, for example, you were limited to synchronising just 10 folders each with up to 10,000 files.

The Live Sync release doubles that to 20 folders and 20,000 files. Despite this, there are lots of users who want more on the Live Sync forum.

And the previous limit of up to 2GB per file is now 4GB.

As before, you can give others access to your files. In Foldershare this was done using shared libraries, now called shared folders in Live Sync, but there is a small catch if you’re upgrading: you’ll need to recreate your shared folders as there’s no automatic upgrade possible from the Foldershare library format.

On the plus side, however, any personal folders will be converted when you update.

Lastly, it’s possible to remotely access a PC logged onto Live Sync and get to any of its files.

The service as a whole is very easy to set up and use, but here’s a quick run-through to give you an idea of what’s involved.

Using Windows Live Sync
All you need to do to get started with Windows Live Sync is go to https://sync.live.com where you’ll find both a Mac and a Windows client (XP or Vista), ready to download and install.

You’ll need a Windows Live ID to do this although, as part of the Live Sync release, no separate sign-in is now required to use the service.

Another enhancement is integration with the local recycle bin, plus there’s Unicode support to enable files in languages other than English to be kept in sync too.

Once the client is running you’ll see a new Live Sync icon on the Windows Taskbar.

Click on this and you can log on to the Sync website using your Windows Live ID and start synchronising files.

Naturally, you’ll need to tell the software which folders to synchronise with.

For convenience, there’s an option to simply synchronise My Documents and other standard Windows folders. I prefer something more obvious.

I’ve created a folder called MySyncFiles on both my desktop PC (Grumpy) and a laptop (Win7PC) specifically for use with Live Sync.

Then I have created a personal folder via the Live Sync website linking the two together, so any adition, changes or deletions in one folder are automatically replicated in the other.

The synchronisation activity all happens in the background.

You also get a little activity monitor to see what has been going on.

If any changes are made to a file the whole thing gets re-copied, not just the updates, but it’s pretty quick and the synchronisation traffic is all peer-to-peer.

Nothing is sent via the website and the traffic is all SSL encrypted for further security.

You do, though, have to be logged onto the Live Sync website (on each PC).

Live Sync also lets you share your folders with other users.

All you have to do is add them using their email addresses and tell Live Sync what rights they should have.

Plus, it’s possible to allow remote access to all your files, but only to yourself.