Live Mesh, my initial thoughts
After reading Andrew Connell's post on Live Mesh, I've decided to give it a try, and see if it can replace Live Sync, which is working very well on my computers, except that it doesn't do mobile sync, or web sync.
Basically, I'm looking at Live Mesh to meet two short comings of Live Sync
1. Web Sync of certain folders, so that I can have access to some files outside my own workstations.
2. Ability to sync sub folders to someone else. E.g. I've set up sync for community projects. That's for me to access the files on any machines I'm developing / testing on. But each project, I work with a different set of people, and sometime, source control is not an option. So I would like to be able to sync a project, (e.g. COP), which resides inside community projects, to members of the project team.
After setting up Mesh with the various computer I have, I like the ability to
1. Sync with web,
2. Potential to extend the Mesh to sync other stuff (What I'm really lacking is true multi device rss reader, (Newsgator does sync all the subscriptions across devices, but doesn't mark a post as read across multiple device),
3. Create a new sync via drag and drop.
I find more short comings for now, though it is not enough to stop me from using. Just have to be careful.
1. If you setup with existing folders which are synced, but not update to date, there is a risk that older files will override newer files (which unlike live sync, will make a copy of them). I was lucky, I was working on the project, hence I can reject reloading in visual studio, and save the new copies back.
2. It is still not able to meet my second requirement.
3. Remote desktop, while useful, is less than usable. I rather use my existing vpn / rdp setup, which is much faster even when done on my HTC Touch Pro (A blog post coming up soon!)
4. Not able to set up the sync in one central location. Live Sync allows you to set up the sync on the web, to various computer, specifying details like where you want to sync to on each computer. But Live Mesh requires to go to each computer to pull it in. Web based setup also doesn't allow you to specify where you want to sync to. This is a big NO NO for me, a control freak!
5. Slow! Live Sync synchronises files much faster!