The potential of Live Mesh is limitless...

I've been having trouble syncing my Thunderbird profiles folder (which contain all the actual data) between my desktop and laptop. Mesh just gets confused for some reason. Curiously, everything else seems to work.

Regarding your 20 gig folder: an "upper bound" is not necessarily a limit. It could be more like "we need to be sure up to 10 gig works well". And note the "we're testing ourselves against". I have a feeling that if the team mean "limit" they would have used that word. A 2 gig file could well be a limit--this thing is expected to work with 32-bit XP--is the limit there 2 or 4 gig? (I don't do big files if I can avoid it.) I do wish that my Vista laptop would stop claiming to install Live Mesh updates the first time it is powered up on a given day. I'm assuming some future actual update will take care of that. (I have removed Mesh from the machine and reinstalled.) (Welcome back Paul--serious envy ensued watching your trip via Twitter.)

bettieblu, I was using an 8GB flash drive, but it got corrupted and would then only hold 1-2 GB. I emailed PCI, the mfg, and they sent me a utilty [that I was unable to DL from thier site on several computers, if it was the same utility, that is.] It was back to 8 GB [OK more like 7.5] then it started corrupting again. I read a lot about these problems with the bigger drives at Newegg, and copying can be slow on the bigger flash drives too. The cloud sseems like a good alternative, but these services need to be less expensive. MobileMe at 99/yr is too much. Smartphone utilities could be the answer, but the ones for the iPohne need WiFi, and I read that the WiFi must be on the same network as the computer that you're using. I will test a $1.99 [2 bucks] utility at the hospital next week since there is WiFi. But you're correct, it just seems easier to wip out your thumb drive and start work. Since I use only small files, i now just carry a very old 32 MB flash in my briefcase. My 104 Nuclear Medicine protocols use 1.3 MB.

gorath Being realistic, which is more likely to get people reading your comments: * Commenting on a popular blog * Writing a blog that nobody knows about That's a inherent problem in self-publishing. You also need self-promotion. And, judging from some of the comment on the major tech blogs lately, those who are good at self promotion very often have very little that's worth reading.

gorath If he DID have a blog then he'd have even more reason to post here so that people could click on his name to go to his blog and read more.

I dont agree with Ocean's style, but Paul is talking about a Live product here, and Ocean's link come from a arstechnica (which is a reputable site) from yesterday that talks about Live and its shrinking popularity.

Yep bettieblu, SanDisk is probably a better brand. I always eject the darn thing before removing and wait until it's fully ejected before removing it from the USB port. I was using it to watch movies on my Philips DVP5982 DVD player with a USB 2 port, and found that the smaller drives are more reliable. Gotta keep FAT32 format as that's all the player reads. I had to partition a 300GB Lacie Porsche drive into a 30GB FAT32 and 270 [less actually] NTFS, so that the movies can be watched on the FAT32. but I have not yet tried to make more FAT32 partitions to see if the player would see all of them, but I doubt it. Do any of you Uber-geeks know of quality differences in flash memory? I ask that respectfully of course.

Ok totally OT @DRWAM I got a FAT32 story for you. Ok so I have a Xbox360 that is wireless, so streaming video to it is a joke over wireless G. So my thought is rip my kids movie collection to an external drive and plug it into the 360 since I can play them from there. I have 3 younger kids that destroy DVD's. So I test it by using my flash drive, ripped one movie plugged it in and ok it works good. So I start ripping, which takes a while per movie, I mostly do it at night etc. Well my USB Hard drive I am going to use is 500gig and its formated with NTFS and I am doing the ripping on a XP box. I get about 20 movies into it and I decide to test. The Microsoft Xbox 360 wont read NTFS?????????? The MS Game console/media device wont reat NTFS, and MS format??? So I find out external drives need to be FAT32 for the 360. Ok copy the movies to the PC and format my external drive with a Windows 98 format style...whatever. Well guess what, I can only format up to 32gig with XP...and....drum roll please....Vista has the same limitation. So the MS game console wont read NTFS, a MS format, but the two latest MS OS'es can only format a fraction of my drive with FAT32 a MS format?????? So I have 50/50 home, as in 50% are Macs. So I plug in my drive to my Mac, running leopard and low and behold I can format the whole drive with FAT32. Lol!!! So then I am doing some more reading and realize that FAT32 cant have bigger than a 4gig file, which once I read that I remember back into the Windows 98 days. So I do so more reading and find out that to support iPods, the 360 has the ability to read HFS drives. So I then format my drive with HFS to remove the 4gig file limitation, using a Mac. Crazy stupid

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm That's all I have to say about the matter.

@gorath http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus None that I will hit in my life time.

I know I have a PS3, but I installed a 320gig notebook drive in it and formatted it with the PS3 OS in about 30 seconds. It is used only for adult T and M games (my games) and its not attached to the TV we use for Movie watching. The thing that kills me about the 360 is using purely MS products they make it hard, if not impossible to hookup my 500gig drive to my 360. Which is a shame because watching movies from the HD is great, since the DVD on the 360 is silent. If I could just install a notebook drive in it like the PS3 is would great. Heck if I did not have 15+ kids games for the 360 I would just move over to the PS3 full time. Then again I would miss out on a few games like Fable II and the follow on to Battlestations Midway.

Leopard. Go into disk utility and choose "MS DOS", and partition (which will format as well) the whole thing. MS DOS in that utility is really FAT32. Takes about 20 seconds to format.

Thanks bettieblu, I had no idea that more than 32GB could be formatted. I have 4 drives in my Pro Tower [ two of which are set up as RAID 0. I was going to mirror [RAID 1] with the RAID 0, but I prefer to back up manually, so not to mrror a problem [although I've never had one] and the 4th is Time Machine. But I will format the entire 300GB external USB 2 drive to use with the DVD player. The 30 GB FAT32 partition got filled fast, but 270 GB more will do the trick. The DVD player is DIVX certified and cost $50 - 100, which is cheaper than the cloud services and any drive works, creating more storage and less expense than streaming technology. However, now that I have a Plasma TV, I may start using the XP box right beside it as the vid card can do it. Media Center just may be in my future. Thanks Doc

"The Xbox 360 should be able to read NTFS " Read my comment about MSC. NTFS isn't part of the spec. The 360 is designed as an entertainment console, not a computer (just like the PS3). "XP/Vista should allow you to format FAT32 up to its limit" Actually you can do it from within Windows XP using the Format.exe commandline program built into Windows (dunno if it works on Vista). It is only restricted during Windows Setup in XP. The reason for restricting it is because of the waste of cluster space and poor performance. See my comment about the free 3rd-party formatting tool. It supports varying cluster sizes. It even works on Vista x64. Docs are on the page. "Windows 98 was a long time ago." Technically 127GB in Windows 98[SE]/ME because of LBA restrictions, but FDISK wouldn't do disks correctly over 64GB in Windows 98's DOS because of a bug. Microsoft eventually issued a fix for that online though. Windows ME had no software restrictions for partitioning, but also didn't support 48-bit LBA so the 127GB limit still existed due to lack of hardware support. And how many people had more than 32GB back when Windows 98 was current?

"Do we know how it handles parent and sub folders? For example if I sync my Music folder that has 10,000 different artist/band sub-folders, are their any limits?" HFS, FAT, or NTFS? Most consoles just index by tags, so you shouldn't need to organize separate folders anyway. The PS3 will only organize music with a set folder layout, otherwise you have to use the "Show all files" option, which displays by filename. You can import tracks into your library and the PS3 will sort them out and index the tags for you. It only displays album art if they're embedded into the tags though - it won't use a Folder.jpg file in the folder the way that Microsoft likes to do it. Media Monkey is a good program for fixing that (editing tags and embedding album art) if you want to use a Microsoft program to rip CD's, such as WMP or the Zune software. I have no idea how the 360 does it.

@mike: my mistake.