Live Mesh Wishlist

I have been using Windows Live Mesh for over a year now, and I have to say it has become an invaluable tool for me. However, I do have a few feature requests I would like to see, to improve its usefulness and usability.

1. Recycle Bin

The biggest risk with Live Mesh is that if you accidentally delete a file on one PC, it gets deleted on all PCs. So you must not think of Live Mesh as a viable backup option, even though it does replicate your files across multiple PCs. I would like to see an option for deleted files to go into a recycle bin in the cloud. So long as you have available space in your 5GB, it should be possible to restore files you have previously deleted. Obviously it should be possible to empty that recycle bin if necessary.

2. Syncing status

The client software needs to give an indication of whether it is still in syncing or not. Often I make changes to a file at work just before I go home. I don’t want to turn the PC off until I know that the change has been uploaded to the cloud.

3. Moving folder problem

In theory it should not be possible to inadvertently delete everything from a synced folder, but I managed to do so. I moved the parent folder which contained the Live Mesh folder to another drive, and moments later, the contents of the folder had been deleted on all my synchronized devices. Fortunately I was able to restore the data, but I would like Live Mesh to handle this scenario more gracefully.

4. Ignore list

It should be possible to “ignore” certain files in a synchronized folder. This would be particularly useful for source code. You could do this at the subfolder level or by extension / filename matching.

5. Backup Option

Finally, if Microsoft want to monetise Live Mesh, offering a backup solution with it would be ideal. This should keep not just deleted files, but could also store previous versions of files, allowing you to revert to earlier versions. On top of this, you could add a new type of Live Mesh folder, where you right-click and select that you simply want it to be backed up. Live Mesh would then upload its contents to the cloud, but the synchronization with other devices would not be needed. If it were reasonably priced, and you could control the scheduling of its bandwidth usage, I would definitely be interested.

Live Mesh First Impressions

I was very interested when I first heard of the Live Mesh product that Microsoft are building, as it looks like it might solve some of the problems I have working on three separate computers (see my previous post on Live Mesh here). It's very rare indeed that I would say this, but on this occasion, Joel Spolsky just doesn't get it.

I signed up at the Live Mesh site to be part of the beta test, and my invitation came through last week, so I installed Live Mesh on each of the three computers, which went smoothly.

Remote Desktop

The first thing I tried was to connect using the remote desktop feature, which worked well although it got the aspect ratio of my laptop screen wrong, and the speed wasn't that great. I eventually crashed FireFox though.

I tried again while I was at work to connect back to one of my home PCs, but it told me that the PC was in use (presumably my wife or children), so I am not sure what the rules for it letting you access are.

One slight downside to the remote desktop is that it does require you to install an ActiveX control, meaning that if you were to be on someone else's PC and wanted to connect back to your home desktop, you would need to install the ActiveX control on their PC.

Folder Sharing

The other key feature I wanted to try out was folder sharing. It is trivially easy to set a shared folder up - simply right-click it and choose "Add folder to your Live Mesh" from the context menu. However, I immediately ran into some limitations. I couldn't share my pictures or my music because currently you must share all folders into your space in the cloud, of which you are limited 5GB. Microsoft have hinted that future versions will allow you to share just between computers without requiring online storage too.

So I decided my test would be to share a folder of source code on a project I am working on. This would allow me to browse and potentially work on the code from other PCs. The project I chose had quite a large source code folder, which ran to just over 1GB. It uploaded to the cloud remarkably quickly, but very soon I was thinking of additional features Live Mesh needs if it is to be really useful.

• I want to exclude certain file types and sub-folders within a synchronized folder. For example, the contents of bin and obj folders are not needed, and one of my subfolders contained a lot of unnecessary data files that I didn't want uploaded.
• When I did a build, so many files in the synchronized folder were changing that the Live Mesh application was using a lot of CPU (my work PC is very underpowered). I could do with a simple way of temporarily turning off sync and turning it back on when I am finished making major changes. This would be a must if I used Live Mesh to share folders for Digital Audio Workstation projects. I would not want it trying to synchronize while I was recording. Update: I have just noticed that the Live Mesh client has a "work offline" option which would probably suffice for most scenarios.
• On my home PCs, I would like to be able to browse the code in this project, but I don't really want to be modifying it (for one thing it is a VS2005 project and my home PC only has VS2008 installed - it would be a disaster if I inadvertently upgraded it!). It would be great if I could set up a folder as a read-only synchronized copy. This might also be useful for music or photo sharing in some instances.

Concerns

As I mentioned in my earlier post, one of my concerns is how much of my monthly broadband allowance Live Mesh will eat up. The ability to synchronize between locally networked devices without going via the Internet would help a lot.

I am also beginning to wonder whether Windows Live OneCare's backup has the intelligence not to back up the same files twice from two PCs in my OneCare circle. Because if I started sharing photos and music, I wouldn't want to start doubling my backup disk space requirements (my USB backup hard disk is getting quite full).

Conclusion

Live Mesh has a lot of promise. If MS can address some of these limitations I have mentioned then I can see the Live Mesh client being a must install on all the PCs I work use.

The fact that it is all or nothing when synchronizing a folder is a little awkward. It means that I would have to either share loads of smaller folders, or radically reorganize my folder structures on my PC so that all things I want to share (e.g. source code projects, documents etc) go in one folder, and the things I don't want to share go in another.

I'm really looking forward though to seeing what features Microsoft will add to Live Mesh, and I've signed up already to try out the SDK when it becomes available.

Thoughts on Live Mesh

I've been watching some videos today on Microsoft's new Live Mesh platform. I have to say that this looks like it has potential to be really good. I've avoided a lot of the Microsoft Live offerings so far, but this is the first one that I am really looking forward to trying out.

Folder Synchronization

Having recently bought a laptop, the challenge of keeping data synchronized between the three computers I use has become quite difficult. I am overly reliant on a 2GB USB stick that would be a disaster if I lost. I use Google Docs quite a lot as well, but don't want to store things on there that I could not do without if I lost Internet connectivity.

So not only will Live Mesh give the benefit of making it very easy to access all my source code, music, photos and documents from any of the computers I use, but it also has a superb secondary benefit of allowing offsite backups of all my most important data. Last year I lost quite a few MP3s due to a blunder reinstalling Windows XP, but I was fortunately able to restore most of them thanks to them being on my work PC. If I had been using folder synchronization, everything would have been recovered.

Remote Desktop Access

Another great feature is the remote desktop access available from any web browser. This is another killer feature, and while it isn't one that I would be using a lot, there are plenty of scenarios where it would save me a huge amount of time.

For example, my ISP rather annoyingly blocks FTP access to my webspace unless I am connecting via my home broadband connection. This means that if I want to make a minor tweak to my site during my lunch hour at work, or while I am on holiday I can't.

It's a Platform

The Microsoft employees were keen to emphasise that Live Mesh is not really about folder sharing and remote desktop access but that it is a platform for future applications to be built on. A good example of a possible future application would be a web browser bookmark synchronizer.

I guess how much it takes off will depend upon how easy it is to program for the platform, and how easy it is for end users to sign up. I will have to wait and see because there is a waiting list at the moment.

Will it work?

Obviously, there are file sharing and remote desktop applications already out there. The success of Live Mesh will be based on whether you can simply install it and it "just works". I do have a couple of concerns though...

1. Capacity

Currently Microsoft are offering 5GB free space. This is of course very generous, but obviously could be used up very quickly. In the video they suggested that eventually it would be possible to synchronize between computers but not store things in the cloud, but that at first you would always have to use the cloud. I would think they need to remove this limitation as soon as possible.

Secondly, if the service could offer additional storage space for a suitably modest fee, this could become ideal for offsite backup.

2. Merging

None of the videos I watched said anything about merging and conflicts. It would be interesting to know what the intention is on this front.

3. Bandwidth

My biggest concern is with bandwidth. My ISP gives me 8GB per month with unlimited downloads overnight. Some laptop users have USB modems that transmit data over mobile phone networks and have even more restricted monthly bandwidth.

I guess once you have performed the initial sync of your folders, bandwidth use would not necessarily be too high, but it would be very useful to be able to throttle bandwidth, or even schedule syncing to be at certain times, with only files that are needed being synchronised at other times. It would also be good if it had the intelligence to synchronise computers that are on the same LAN without going through the Internet. Otherwise I could see myself using my entire month's bandwidth up within a day or so of installing the software.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. What about you? Are you planning to use Live Mesh?