Pros
Cons
Our Verdict
Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2013. Every day (except Sunday) from mid-July until late September, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a standout free or low-cost program. Learn more about GemFest in this Macworld podcast. You can view a list of this year’s apps, updated daily, on our handy GemFest page, and you can visit the Mac Gems homepage for past Mac Gems reviews.
When it comes to syncing files and folders across devices, Dropbox inevitably comes up. However, Dropbox does take some amount of curating, and occasionally you can forget to put that new file you just made into Dropbox. The aim of Quicksand 1.02 is to keep a copy recently-opened files in a single convenient location so you can access the files from any computer.
Quicksand is fairly customizable in its behavior. You can set how many of your most recent files you want to keep a copy of, as well as where to keep them. This lets you opt to place the folder in Dropbox or other cloud storage, allowing you access to your most recent files from anywhere. When you make any changes to the files synced with Quicksand in your cloud drive, the changes are made to the original file as well. You don’t have to worry about copying the file back from your cloud drive to its original location later.
Quicksand lets you set a maximum size for the folder, but I wish it let you specify a maximum file size as well. Opening a large .dmg installer for Mountain Lion caused it to sync to every computer I have Dropbox installed on (quite a few), which was unexpected and unwelcome. However with a little tinkering, I managed to set it up to my liking. Quicksand offers the ability to white list and black list directories as well as file types, which was a big help.
Quicksand is great if you have trouble efficiently sorting your most recent files. It isn’t perfect, but I encourage you to give it a shot; you might be surprised how often it saves you from trying to dig up a file.
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