Dave Donaldson

Sync Windows Live Writer Drafts Between 2 PCs

Saturday, January 05 2008

Since I've started using Windows Live Writer to manage all my blog posts, I've needed to write from both my desktop and laptop. The problem is that if I start writing a post on my desktop, save it as a draft, and then want to finish the post from my laptop while watching TV at night, the draft is not on my laptop (or vice versa). That's a bit of a pain.

But there's a really simple solution: use FolderShare to sync drafts between both machines. If you've never used FolderShare before, it's very easy to use and it's free. You basically do the following:

1. Install the FolderShare software (really small, runs in the background).
2. Add devices (computers).
3. Add folders to share.
4. Set to sync.

And that's it. FolderShare takes care of the rest; you can even invite other people to have access to your stuff.

So for Windows Live Writer, once you set it up to connect to your blog, it creates a folder in My Documents named My Weblog Posts, which contains two other folders: Drafts and Recent Posts. With FolderShare, I created a new library named My_Weblog_Posts with two devices (my desktop and my laptop), both mapped to their respective My Weblog Posts folder (in turn keeping both the Drafts and Recent Posts folders in sync). Then for both devices I set the sync type to Automatic and I'm good to go, as shown below: