Mesh

I’m a big fan of Windows Live Mesh and use it extensively for keeping copies of books (mainly PDF) synchronised between home and work machines, however it’s clearly not a backup solution.

Here is a quick overview of what it does (or at least how I use it), although you’d probably be better off going to the web site to see the official description.

Mesh is owned and operated by Microsoft, uses a passport login (so if you’ve got a hotmail or live account, for example, then you can just sign in and start using it) and provides 5Gb of free online file storage space which you can pretty much do with what you want.

From within your browser there’s a web interface that provides a Windows style desktop on which you can create individual folders, then from within these folders you can drag and drop files to upload, and later download to another machine.

Nothing new there I hear you say. Indeed, but the clever bit (and I know there are solutions from other providers that will do the same) is the Mesh Operating Environment service which sits in your Windows tool tray and allows you to download and keep synchronized the folders you created above onto the local machine. Additionally you can select a local folder and choose to have this synchronised to the online space, where it will also appear on the web desktop for access via the browser on machines without MOE installed.

Client machines with MOE installed can choose which folders to synchronise and where they should be located locally (and even allow you to rename the local name), so your own folder structure locally doesn’t need to mirror the remote structure or other instances (although nested folders will have their contents synchronised as part of the parent folder, as you’d expect).

The real power of this is that multiple machines can connect to your Mesh account, so for example, if I add a file to my work PC, by the time I get home it will be copied to my home PC automatically. Want to work on that work office document from home? Don’t worry about copying it to a USB key (or other device), if you set up correctly then it will be at home before you are!

This is all very cool, but needs to be used with some care, and explains why Mesh can’t be used as a backup solution; if one file gets corrupted/deleted/changed then this propagates to all instances of that file located remotely too. I’ve lost a lot of work by making silly mistakes like this, what Mesh needs is an archive or history feature to allow files to be restored to an earlier time, more on one of these mistakes in a later post.

The mesh framework also bizarrely allows for remote PC connection in the style of VNC or Remote Desktop, although not quite as slick.

Folders/files can also be shared with other users allowing for some collaboration (although Office Live does a better job of this, more on that another time), and at some point in time they may actually get around to releasing the promised mobile client.

As it stands Mesh is a useful tool and one I make use of on a regular basis, but do ensure you keep backups away from it, otherwise you may get stung. If they ever bring in an archive then Mesh will be of far more use and could become a must have for anyone working on more than one PC in multiple locations.