Keeping files synchronised across different PCs is, frankly, a pain in the rump. You work on a document at home over the weekend, only to forget to drop it on a USB stick before Monday morning, and end up missing a deadline. Or you’ve got photo libraries stored on two different home PCs, with different albums in each.

Microsoft’s Live Mesh and online start-up Dropbox have come up with similar answers to this problem, offering online services that keep your files in synch across multiple PCs. Both are at the invite-only test phase at present, but we’ve wormed out way into the private betas. Here’s how they compare.

MICROSOFT LIVE MESH

Unlike a number of Microsoft’s other online initiatives, Live Mesh certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of ambition. It eventually plans to synchronise files across a broad range of devices, ranging from PCs to smartphones to (whisper it) Macs.

For now, however, the service is restricted to XP and Vista PCs. You start by downloading the Live Mesh client software on to your PCs – and immediately recoil in astonishment as the software takes it upon itself to Auto Arrange the carefully placed icons on your Windows desktop. Not a good start.

Live Mesh accounts are linked to your Windows Live account, allowing the service to determine which other devices are connected to your Mesh. You give each new device a name (i.e. ‘work laptop’) to tell them apart in the Live Mesh device manager, and PCs can be added or removed at any time.

Files or folders are added to the Mesh simply by right-clicking on them and selecting Add Folder To Your Live Mesh. The folder instantly turns blue to signify that it’s part of the Mesh, and distinguish itself from ordinary files stored only locally on your PC.

Live Mesh now sets about uploading the contents of the synchronised file/folder to “the cloud”. Simultaneously, it will be creating a copy of that shared folder on to the desktop of every other PC that’s part of your Mesh. The shared folder is stored locally on each machine so that it remains available even when the PC is offline. Files can now be modified, added or removed from that shared folder using any PC in the Mesh, with changes synchronised across all other PCs on the Mesh as quickly as their network connections permit – within a few seconds, in our experience.

A sidebar attached to each Live Mesh folder handily keeps you updated on any activity in the folder, so you know instantly if someone’s edited a photo or removed a file, for example.

Microsoft’s clearly given some thought to potential synchronisation pitfalls. If you add a folder to the Live Mesh with an identical name to a folder on one of your other PCs, a “001” suffix is added to the new folder to prevent potential conflicts. And if you decide to remove a folder from the Mesh (which can only be done using the online interface), a copy of the folder remains on each PC, but it obviously won’t be synchronised from then on in.

Files stored on the Live Mesh aren’t only available on the connected PCs; they’re also available from any web browser, via the “Live Desktop”. Sadly, in typical Microsoft fashion, this has been thoroughly overcomplicated, not least because it uses Microsoft’s own Silverlight technology to create needless smooth-scrolling slideshows of images, for example, instead of simply providing access to your files. You’ll be both shocked and appalled to learn that this works remarkably better in Internet Explorer than it does in Firefox, where we experienced several crashes when trying to do something as simple as view a photo.

Worse still, if you want to share one of your Live Mesh folders with a friend or colleague, they have to use the Silverlight web interface, severely hampering what might otherwise have been a very cool feature indeed.

Nevertheless, Live Mesh remains an impressively powerful and extremely convenient service. Knowing that you can get access to certain folders from any net-connected PC – whether they are on the Mesh or not – provides real peace of mind. And with 5GB of storage to play with, it could even prove to be a decent fallback for backing up critical files.

DROPBOX

Dropbox is an altogether more simple affair. Once installed on your PC, a small box icon appears in your System Tray. Double-clicking on the box opens the Dropbox, where, as the name suggests, you simply drag and drop the files you want to share across your various PCs.

It’s not as convenient as the option to right click on any folder in Live Mesh, but it’s neater, with all your shared documents and folders conveniently stored in one place, rather than potentially strewn across your PC. As with Live Mesh, the files are instantly synchronised across all the PCs on which you’ve installed the Dropbox software.

If you want to share documents with friends or colleagues, they must be deposited in your Dropbox’s public folder. From here you can simply right click on the file and Dropbox automatically creates a public link. Email that link to a friend, and they can view the photo, document or whatever from the Dropbox website. Likewise, you can share entire folders, although this has to be managed through an online wizard.

Dropbox has been set up by a bunch of former MIT students, and so without a corporate battalion of servers to fall back on, the service only offers 2GB of storage compared to Live Mesh’s 5GB – but that’s still more than ample for sharing a selection of everyday files and folders that you want to access from anywhere.

Where Dropbox is streets ahead of Live Mesh is with its web interface. As with Microsoft’s service, you can log in from any web browser to get access to your files, but there’s no Silverlight-esque airs and graces: files are folders are neatly presented, and it’s easy to locate and download (if necessary) the files you need access to without any extra plug-ins.

In the end, the choice is between Microsoft’s powerful but slightly over-powering software, or a more nimble and lightweight rival. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

Tags: Dropbox, Live Mesh, online storage, synchronisation

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Just in, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.