1

I am using Live Mesh on several computers: one Vista machine, one Windows 7 and another XP. It will sync perfectly between them if I sync to the Live Desktop. However, if I try and do peer-to-peer synchronization as per the official Live Mesh instructions (and this article), it simply will not work. The folder appears as a member of the mesh on both sides, but no files sync.

Does anyone know of a reason why this might be the case? Can anyone verify peer-to-peer actually works?

Two of the machines are on the same LAN, while the third (the XP machine) is remote.

Charles Roper
  • 10,599
  • 16
  • 56
  • 75
  • What does "simply will not work" mean? Which error messages? Did you look into the Event Log? – harrymc Oct 24 '09 at 17:56
  • I qualified that statement with the next sentence: "The folder appears as a member of the mesh on both sides, but no files sync." No error messages. I hadn't looked in the event log, but a quick glance there revealed nothing. – Charles Roper Oct 25 '09 at 20:06

2 Answers2

2

Well the answer to my question was "have patience". The folder I was trying to sync was quite large (~10GB, with a mix of small and large files) and when I added the folder to the mesh on the source machine, unknown to me, Live Mesh spent a very long time doing some sort of processing on the source files (hashing them maybe? I don't know). Around 2 hours later, the files started to sync.

Although the files sync'd eventually, the process was very unintuitive and felt quite buggy. Once I had added the second computer on my LAN, I would have expected some sort of feedback on either computer to say something was happening. I ended up having to look in the resource monitor for file read/write activity to work out anything was going on at all. Once the files actually started to sync, the Live Mesh tray icon started spinning, but as I say, that was after about 2 hours of absolutely no user feedback whatsoever.

Live Mesh could definitely do with a better user experience here. More feedback as to what is going in especially.

Charles Roper
  • 10,599
  • 16
  • 56
  • 75
  • nice followup/postmortem on the situation. – quack quixote Oct 25 '09 at 22:28
  • Thanks. One thing I've been reminded of in using Live Mesh is that when Microsoft say something is beta, they *really* mean beta. To me, Live Mesh still feels very beta and rough around the edges. – Charles Roper Oct 29 '09 at 10:39
  • MS is about to kill peer-to-peer sync so this information will be no longer accurate, by some time mid 2012. – Warren P Mar 29 '12 at 13:04
  • That's OK, I stopped using Live Mesh long ago and instead use Dropbox. The syncing with Dropbox has, in my experience, always been superior to Live Mesh. – Charles Roper Apr 11 '12 at 15:46
0

Things to check:

  • In Vista and 7, is your network location set to Home?
  • Have you verified that there is a firewall exception for the program?
Factor Mystic
  • 12,647
  • 7
  • 47
  • 53