Sharing Files With a Friend Across the Country

Reader Brent writes: I would like to share files and folders with my brother who is located in another state. How do I do this? I have heard of VPNs but it all sounds too difficult. Is there an easy way for him to see what is on my computer and vice versa and also possibly download from each other?

A VPN would be the way to go... if you were both network administrators willing to go through the headache of setting it up.

I agree with you, Brent. A VPN is too complex, so here are some simpler alternatives.

My first suggestion would be to try FolderShare, which provides exactly the kind of features you're looking for. You set up FolderShare on the two machines, and folders on those machines can be shared over the Internet. You can also set it up to synchronize the contents of those folders, so you'll both always have an updated copy of each other's information. The service (which is in beta) is free, for now, and was recently bought by Microsoft, so it may appear in a future version of Windows in some form.

I've also written about GoToMyPC in the past, which lets you take remote control of another computer completely. It also includes file browsing and transferring features, but at $180 a year, it might be more than you're willing to pay just to send a few files around.

You could also consider a centralized file sharing service and both put the data you want to share on the Internet. Historically these services have been used for backing up data, but there's no reason why you couldn't both use it to share files between one another. I've used Xdrive successfully in the past. PC World just did a monster review of 17 of these services, as well.

There are hardware solutions too which allow remote access to remote computers, but I wouldn't recommend them for your specific situation. If one of the above methods doesn't work out, let me know, and we'll dig deeper.