I have a Mac and a PC that I was syncing with Live Sync. I started hitting some of the size limits and decided to switch to Live Mesh for the larger limits that it offers. During the initial sync with it, I've run into a couple of problems.
1. It's really, really slow. It's been running for about twelve hours now and on one machine says that it has downloaded only 150 MB out of the 12.6 GB that need to be synced. 2. I'm getting lots of conflicts where my files have different time stamps (though they are otherwise identical). I've had a few hundred of these already, and don't have time to sit at the computer and keep telling it to keep one set of files.
Hi, Matt. Live Mesh synchronizes slowly in the background, so I'm not surprised in the fact that it is taking a long time for the initial sync. However, 150 Megs seems to be a bit slow for 12 hours. Are you synchronizing with the Live Desktop, too, or just peer to peer? The current sync process for Live Mesh is pretty rudimentary. If the time stamp is different, that means that there is a conflict for you to painfully resolve. Unfortunately, there is no way around the conflict resolution process. What I've done in the past is to manually copy all of the files between devices so that they are in Sync *before* I add the folder into the Mesh and then merge it with the folder on the other PCs in the Mesh. -steveMicrosoft MVP Windows Live / Windows Live OneCare, Live Mesh, & MS Security Essentials Forums Moderator
Hi, Matt. Live Mesh synchronizes slowly in the background, so I'm not surprised in the fact that it is taking a long time for the initial sync. However, 150 Megs seems to be a bit slow for 12 hours. Are you synchronizing with the Live Desktop, too, or just peer to peer? The current sync process for Live Mesh is pretty rudimentary. If the time stamp is different, that means that there is a conflict for you to painfully resolve. Unfortunately, there is no way around the conflict resolution process. What I've done in the past is to manually copy all of the files between devices so that they are in Sync *before* I add the folder into the Mesh and then merge it with the folder on the other PCs in the Mesh. -steveMicrosoft MVP Windows Live / Windows Live OneCare, Live Mesh, & MS Security Essentials Forums Moderator
I haven't started synchronizing with Live Desktop yet. Way too many files to fit there currently.
I thought about the manual copy, but wasn't sure if it would work properly. I had some problems with that when I first started using Live Sync. Do you happen to know how the Live Mesh sync process compares to the Live Sync process? I hate to put all the time into converting if it isn't going to work as well as before.
I can't give you the technical details of how they compare as I simply don't know them. :-) I use both, but Live Sync in a rather limited way for one folder on multiple machines. The big difference, of course, is that Live Mesh has the Live Desktop if you wish to use it. Both programs do full file sync and don't examine the contents of the files. Conflict resolution in Live Mesh seems to be more painful, with Live Sync just renaming the files and giving you both versions on all devices. Live Mesh makes you deal with conflicts one at a time in the notifier. As I noted, I didn't have an issue when copying the contents of PC #1 to PC #2 and then setting the identical folders up as a Mesh folder, merging the offered folder from PC #1 to the copied destination on PC #2. One other thing to note, it is a pretty good possibility, based on rumors that have been floating around, that we will actually see Live Sync and Live Mesh merged in the future (along with SkyDrive) since they really provide quite similar functionality. The big difference currently is that Live Sync is a "released" product and Live Mesh is still a beta today. -steveMicrosoft MVP Windows Live / Windows Live OneCare, Live Mesh, & MS Security Essentials Forums Moderator
