In the past few weeks I have been using Live mesh more and
more to its full capacity both on web view and for syncing files, in this time
I have seen a few things which never really occurred to me before.
Firstly live mesh is a great product, being able to sync files between
computers but also having access to them offline e.g. when travelling is simply
brilliant. Something very simple yet very effective. Giving you updates on what’s
going on with your files, what’s been deleted etc is also a great feature, really
helps you keep track of what’s going on.
Sadly this bliss was short-lived until last week when DropBox
(www.getdropbox.com) was made available to the public. As soon as I installed
this I seen a number of flaws in Live Mesh that I hadn't seen before.
Firstly is memory usage, I understand that live mesh has a remote desktop
facility and dropbox lacks this feature but on my laptop with 1GB of memory
Live mesh is currently using 120MB of RAM or 12% of the total system RAM,
Dropbox on the other hand is using 28MB. That’s a huge difference in
efficiency, when I have visual studio open and live mesh is taking up that much
memory the disk is constantly thrashing. I know some people will say well I
need more RAM, well I don't see 1GB on Windows XP as a small amount, its
probably more than most on XP.
Secondly, the interface is much better featured on Dropbox e.g. you can make
files public literally at the click of button even get the link from within
Explorer/Finder that is simply brilliant. On the web interface if you delete a
file you can simply login and recover the deleted file, all nice and simple.
The monitoring of files is much better with changes detected almost instantly.
What really tops it off for me is multiplatform with Live Mesh I could never sync
files with my Mac, that caused some slight problem meaning I had to use the web
interface. Not ideal I'd much rather just have the files there, especially if I
got a Macbook without an internet connection. Just a few days ago Dropbox was
released on Linux as well.
When Live Mesh was released it was supposed to be this great multiplatform sync
solution, it seems to have become very much a Windows only which I don't think
is good. It has great potential but sadly Microsoft's way seem to be stifling a
otherwise great product.
