Sunday, April 04, 2010

Live Mesh: Your first step onto the Cloud

Paul Thurrott just posted on how he' uses Live Mesh, and I remembered I’m overdue to jump on this particular bandwagon.

Live Mesh is one of Microsoft’s consumer-facing, free applications that gives you up to 5 GB of storage somewhere in one of their massive data centers – i.e., the Cloud. I won’t duplicate Paul’s remarks on how it works; I just think you should use it. image

Live Mesh has pretty much replaced USB keys for me as the next generation of portable storage. First we had the floppy or diskette drive. (Can you imaging how limiting 1.44 MB is now? And the speed of it??) Then we started using networking to copy files. Now we have USB keys as a quick way to copy large files between computers…but they don’t keep them synchronized. I’ll be the first to admit my job no longer involves moving from server to server to server installing things, but I haven’t had to do that for oh, well over a decade.

My biggest portable need is creative work – articles, presentations, webcasts - that I typically develop on my home PC, then either use on my notebook at my company’s offices in Seattle or give presentations at a conference. Before Mesh I’d always be copying files to a key (or before that, burning it to a disc) to be absolutely sure I had the presentation and a backup in case it was corrupted, deleted, or my notebook hosed itself. (Or I forgot the power cord…but that was a long time ago :-} ).

I’ve moved all my presentation and webcast development work to a Mesh folder , and synchronize it between my home PC, my work notebook, and my Live desktop. Within minutes of updating a file on one side, I know I’ll have received the updates on the other side. It has another plus on the disaster recovery side: You can go to any internet-connected computer, go to http://mesh.com, login to your Live account, and access all the files on your Live desktop. I used this at my last conference to download the latest versions of my conference presentations to the conference director when we realized his Vista notebook didn’t recognize my portable Bitlocker-encrypted USB drive.

Here’s another use: A few months ago I set a shared folder up with a friend that was going to New Zealand. He’d take photos during the day, download them to his notebook, sync them overnight, and the next day I could browse through them here in the States. We were only limited by the bandwidth on his side to upload his big Canon DSLR images.

It’d definitely not perfect. It’s emphatically NOT for inter-company collaboration, or really any kind of collaboration with frequent updates. There’s no file locking, so more than one person could be working a file and you have a versioning mess. You also can’t put the Mesh folders anywhere other than on your desktop. I get around that by putting all the folders in a Windows 7 library I call Live Mesh. There’s a 5 GB limit in files, though as Paul points out you can get around that by simply not synchronizing a folder with the Live Desktop. Finally, when you create a new folder on the Live Desktop Mesh annoyingly creates a shortcut on ALL your shared device’s desktop, seemingly just in case you might want to add the folder to it.

Warts and all, Live Mesh is a really handy tool that gives you a very first-person feel for blurring the distinction between what’s local and what’s out there in the cloud. And though there haven’t been any recent updates to it, Mesh is one of Ray Ozzie’s pet projects, so expect we’ll be hearing more about it in the future.

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