Or how I came to love Live Mesh

This weekend I started playing with a new technology from Microsoft that's been dubbed "Live Mesh." This is a platform that enables syncing sets of data across multiple devices, while also making that data available in "the cloud" (there's that term of the moment that I'll be using a lot).

Here the scenario that I'm playing with right now: I have four computers that include a personal laptop, a work laptop, a Media Center and a little netbook (that's a really small laptop). I have a fair amount of ripped and Amazon/Zune DRM-free music that I'd like to play on all of these systems...about 10GB worth. With the Media Center as my primary repository for music, it became a very manual process to make sure I always copied any music I bought on one system to the other. There are a number of tools to do this, but I didn't want to pay for something that I could do by hand (or even scheduled, i.e., SyncToy). There's also that sticky issues of not always being connected to my home LAN. Enter Live Mesh. Any time I update my "Music Mesh" folder on any one of those four system, Live Mesh will push it out to the other systems. This P2P sync is pretty fast, and will use your local LAN if two or more systems are connected. All of the meta data associated with the sync is stored in the cloud.

The second scenario is have access to data in the cloud from any system. Today you are allotted only 5GB of space; with this space you can set up sync "to the cloud" as well. That means from my browser, on any system, I can access my Live Desktop and can see all of my synced folders and the data in those folders. Pretty cool.

There are some drawbacks. The sync if file based, not changes based, so any update, such as a rename, requires the whole file to get re-synchronized to the other systems. The sync can also take a while for large data sets; I've noticed it starts and stops and an occasional reboot is required to get things moving again. This is beta, so hiccups are expected.

I'll make one comment about Apple's MobileMe. There have been a ton of problems with that service so far. I'm not surprised. After listening to some of the Channel 9 video's about Live Mesh, you really begin to understand how this "simple" concept is extremely complex. I wish Apple some luck in getting things humming.

Check things out at http://www.mesh.com and see if it makes sense for you. Mobile phone and Mac support is on the horizon.