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I love Live Mesh

Jun. 10, 2008 Paul Thurrott | Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

I'm going to be awash in Apple stuff this week, thanks to the iPhone 3G and MobileMe announcements. But in writing a WinInfo article about yesterday's WWDC keynote this morning, I'm reminded in how absolutely special and wonderful Microsoft's Live Mesh is, even in this simplistic early beta. So allow me a brief side track to once again express my love of this product. Basically, I was sitting at the kitchen table, working off a laptop. 9:00 comes, so I want to head into the office, and the traditional extra step at this point is to save the document on the network somewhere so I can then access it from my desktop PC. I was mulling this over briefly when I remembered, hey, I don't need to do that at all. I just saved the document, closed the lid on my laptop, and went into my office. Turning on the PC, I opened the document from my local Documents folder and, voilà, there was the article I was working on a moment earlier on a different machine. This works because I'm using Live Mesh to synchronize my Documents folder across all the PCs in my mesh. It's automatic and it's effectively simultaneous.

God, I love Live Mesh.

Back to work...

Discuss this Article 15

lotsamystuff
on Jun 10, 2008
That's slicker than snot on a doorknob. It's quite an adjustment to get used to these tools when they're coming so fast and furious these days.
Josh_Miller
on Jun 10, 2008
My main beef with Live Mesh is that I can't seem to disable the midway sync with Skydrive. What happens if I want to sync more than 5 gigs? Does it go ahead and sync across the PCs bypassing the full Skydrive or does it just crap out at the size cap?
weedmonk
on Jun 10, 2008
Funny you said that because I had mesh moment myself last week. I have my AppData folder set to sync to Live Desktop just for disaster recovery. So I was back home last week and I couldn't for the life of me find a link I wanted to show the folks, But then struck me that the Mozilla folder under AppData should have synced since my last browsing session on my desktop and I was able to find my FF user history and the link. I love technology.
MLomasIcomm
on Jun 10, 2008
I used to use Groove to sync files between my main desktop PC and my laptop - no more, I got rid of it and use Mesh now, with it's added advantage of 'files anywhere' using the Live Desktop - perfect :)
Cfischer83
on Jun 10, 2008
Don't rub it in! It's not out of "invite-only" status yet... and I really want to try it out :(
pthurrott
on Jun 10, 2008
I wish I could do invites. I don't believe there's a way beyond sharing a folder with someone and obviously that's not very good.
daProject
on Jun 10, 2008
iDisk does that :) Do you think Microsoft will make a client for the iPhone? I would love to be able to access my Documents folder while on the move. Obviously not to edit but with the iPhone able to read so many document types now it would be incredibly useful.
BrightrevCarl
on Jun 10, 2008
Yeah - Groove has been doing this very thing for several years and never got the attention it deserved. I used Groove as a backup method for mobile workers, by synching their files to a central file server. I think it's great that Microsoft pushed this into the consumer space and added the Live Desktop aspect. They haven't yet done a great job explaining Live Mesh, which is actually pretty simple - your data will be available on any computer or mobile device. It's going to be interesting to see what Apple does with its "mobileme" product, which on the surface is similar to Live Mesh. I believe Microsoft's intent with Live Mesh is to go beyond e-mail, calendar, contacts, files, photos and movies, but we'll see how that goes. Competition is a very good thing.
dstrack
on Jun 10, 2008
Same here... Love Live Mesh. So useful for me. Cannot wait until they support Macs so I can bring my MacBook Air into the loop and my WinMo device.
feralboy
on Jun 10, 2008
Another Live Mesh fan...one of the nice little extras is being able to leave a comment on a folder...wish they would allows comments on files so you don't have to open them to job the memory. Can't wait to see where they go with this tool. My guess is that I may not need my Windows Home Server in a year or so...
dstrack
on Jun 10, 2008
feralboy - I actually don't think I'd ever get rid of my WHS just because of the amount of storage that will be there as opposed to my individual machines (I'm up to 4TB on my WHS, meanwhile most of my machines only have less than 500GB)... unless MSFT is going to give us VERY cheap Terabytes of memory in the "cloud"... although I'm not sure I trust ALL of my stuff in the cloud... at least not in 12 months... maybe 12 years... but I can see the Mesh expanding into a huge deal. Really cool stuff.
rickhuizinga
on Jun 10, 2008
I began to question the usefulness of Windows Home Server after beginning to use Live Mesh, but I would never be able to live without the automated nightly backups.
j4m3s0n79
on Jun 10, 2008
Yet another satisfied live mesh customer. My only beef is that the web desktop is dramatically slower than the rdp counterpart. So far, I have about 6 devices on my ring, and for my Mininote from HP, it's perfect. Not having to sync stuff up is just awesome. Since I have a few always on PCs too, a document is never too far away. Now if I can just get an HSPA express card from work, my ditital life will be zen. I wonder if MS will integrate Albany into the live desktop. That would be freakin awesome. Now you would have apps and docs availble. Rumor has it that when mesh comes out of beta, it will be an Ultimate Extra (just kiddin about that last part) :)
jf181
on Jun 10, 2008
I'll have to try this...I just started using office live and think that's a great product. I can't imagine ever using google docs again now that I can save my files to one place.
feralboy
on Jun 10, 2008
@ dstrack: 4TB on your WHS? Wow, that's a whole lotta data. It's just me at Castle Feralboy, so I've got a measly 1.2 TB. Heh. I get your drift, but a couble tears from now, we'll have TB drives in our laptops and half TB in our phones (okay, maybe that's a couple more years off), so I'd guess that the online storage will grow by leaps and bounds... @ rickhuzinga -- yeah, I'm totally dependent on the daily backups too, and dig my WHS...I'm just saying that I think all of that funtionality will eventually get build into Mesh...it seems to make sense to me. The Mesh version of Remote Desktop is impressive, but it's much slower than the WHS implementation, so I always use that.

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