Live Mesh: Now Cracks a Noble Heart. Good Night Sweet Prince

[I wrote this last weekend. I was not expecting to have to publish it so soon.]

One of the best and most overlooked little applications that Microsoft ever released was called Live Mesh. Live Mesh was a fantastic little program that unobtrusively did exactly what it said it would, which is rare. It was a neat little tool that combined file synchronization and remote desktop access. It was free. It was fast. And best of all, it worked.

I fell in love with Live Mesh during its beta period. The interface changed a few times, and it was relegated into the dustbin of Windows Live Essentials, a toolkit of totally non-essential add-ons for the Windows platforms, somewhere above the status of a quirky demo application, somewhere below the cachet of a core utility. In the before time, in the long long ago, these bonus apps would have been called PowerToys: great to have if you know how to find and run them.

Live Mesh was different. It's actually an essential, not an Essential. The remote desktop feature was nice because it could slide around restrictive firewalls rather easily. It saved my bacon a few times. I walked my sister through installing Live Mesh over the phone once so I could remote into it and fix whatever she'd broken from thousands of miles away. Afterwards I changed my Hotmail password and removed her machine from of my mesh. She was out. Done. It's a handy utility if you don't feel like paying for the VNC-based Fog Creek equivalent called Copilot. I beta tested Copilot when it was a summer project being developed by interns, and it's great. Check it out.

The real gem though, the raison d'être to put Live Mesh on absolutely every Windows machine I have, was its synchronization feature. Live Mesh is really MOE, the Mesh Operating Environment, which can take a directory on, say, your laptop, look at all the files and directories it contains, and send them to, say, your home PC. If any files are moved, added, or changed in that directory, those changes are reflected on the other machine as well. You can sync a single directory across numerous hosts effortlessly. Make folders called "A", "B", and "C". Sync "A" between your laptop and your home server, sync "B" between your server and your media station, sync "C" between them all. Add a file from any machine and watch it go to the rest. Delete a file from any machine and it will go into the Recycle Bin on the others. Easy. Practically invisible. I loved it dearly.

If there's an upper limit on the number of devices that can share a directory, I never found it. Better still, even though all these synchronized folders are scattered around your machines, you can look at a centralized view of all of them and make basic changes from anywhere. This works through a proxying service run by Microsoft somewhere on or around a place called "storage.mesh.com". The Mesh Operating Environment keeps a dialtone open to this service from every device, and when one of them reports a change to the files in that directory, the change is reported to the rest of the devices almost instantly. Better still, the storage proxy does not necessarily need to keep copies of your files. Though that's an option you can enable, you can also just as easily pass files through the proxy and the only place where they are kept is on your own hardware. This is PC-to-PC file synchronization, and though it's not exactly peer-to-peer the way you might like due to the need for Microsoft's mesh service to act as an intermediary, it's incredibly advantageous for one big reason: you control your storage availability.

Assume you have some files. Lots and lots of files. Files of many shapes and sizes. Music files, text files, Word documents, binaries, all the myriad scraps of data that make it your data. If you were to keep copies of all your files with a third party, there would be only so much storage that they'd be willing to give you, at least for free. At the time of this writing, Google will let you keep just about 10 GB of data in your Gmail account. Live Mesh allotted a few gigs at first, I think maybe 2; it's 5 GB now.

I was at dinner the other night with some folks and I mentioned my contempt for The Service That Shall Not Be Named. It also maintains a limit of 5 GB, which is the same as Live Mesh. "I love [The Service That Shall Not Be Named]," said the intern. "It's limited to five gigs. How do you not have more than five gigs of data?" I asked. "Well, I only use it for documents and things," he says. I stared blankly for a beat. "How do you not have more than five gigs of data?"

If I so chose I could take an entire hard disk, hundreds of gigabytes, and sync it to another machine with Live Mesh. If I've got the disk space on every end, I'm set. It might take a couple of days, but it's doable. With The Service That Shall Not Be Named, PC-to-PC synchronization is not even an option. To use it, I copy data to a third party, then every other machine copies it from there. It's no longer a synchronization proxy, it's a data store itself. They get copies of my files and they keep them. Instead of notifying the proxy I want to copy from A to B, I can only copy from A to the proxy, then B gets a notification to copy from the proxy. If I have more data on A than space they want to give me, I'm out of luck.

Imagine my delight upon learning that Live Mesh was being sunset faster than I expected. The darling of Windows Live Essentials 2011 is already replaced in the Windows Essentials 2012 package. Though the proxy service might not go away for a few more years [Ed: I should have said months. It goes away 2013-02-13, the tenth anniversary of the death of my father. Haven't I suffered enough?], it's only a matter of time before it gets shut off permanently and Live Mesh is bid adieu with the same reverence as day-old bread. This is an insult to a fine program.

So what are the alternatives? Where do we go from here? The Service That Shall Not Be Named is the designated successor to Live Mesh, which is as rewarding as voting for John F. Kennedy and winding up with Lyndon Johnson in charge just because some asshole you'd never heard of felt empowered to make a hollow point. There's also a Pro version of That Service, which is somehow even worse. Surprise, it's just a rebranded Groove wrapper for Sharepoint. So if you want to sync, say, anything other than the limited file types that Sharepoint supports, you're screwed. I know. I tried. There's Google Drive, but that's a third-party storage mechanism as well.

I'm not looking for third-party storage. I'm looking for file synchronization, done intelligently. Of course I could just manually run Unison, or a homebrew push-pull rsync script, or SyncToy. When I just have to move one directory every once in a while these are the sorts of tools I'll use, but they pale in comparison to the ease and transparency of installing Live Mesh and forgetting about it.

So that's when a friend told me about SparkleShare.

Next time: SSH and Git, two great tastes that taste great together.