Microsoft opens up Live Mesh | Beyond Binary – A blog by Ina Fried – CNET News.com

It’s official, Live Mesh is now available.  No surprise that they opened it up a week after Apple’s Mobile Me was up and running.  Both of these options are solutions to computing in the cloud.  The Cloud?  Moving all our content, documents, files, mail, contacts, photographs into the cloud for easy access on any computer.  This is clearly the future of computing and Apple and Microsoft are leading the charge.  I’ve never used Apple’s .Imac or MobileMe.  Partly because it has an annual cost ($99). These tools also allow us to allegedly sync our information between computers and devices.  Live Mesh didn’t support Macs yet, but it’s in the future plans.

I have used it and found that bandwidth seems to be the biggest limitation.  If you really want to sync large amounts of data, you will be disappointed.  It takes too much time to upload or download.  I think the best use of Mesh is to backup document folders remotely.  I’ve used it to backup my writing files and some of my master Flash files.  Two frustrations: when Live Mesh is running, it sometimes prevents me from deleting files or folders (took me a while to figure out why I kept getting error messages), you cannot upload folders of files.  You can upload one or more files, but not folders of files.  You have to manually create folders and then upload the contents.  Not convenient.  I’ll revisit it again in a year, and perhaps they will add Macs, allow drag and drop folder options, and clean up the issues with file management.