Live Mesh: cannot sync peer-to-peer. Why?

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

Posted 2009-10-24T17:09:41.027

Reputation: 9 646

What does "simply will not work" mean? Which error messages? Did you look into the Event Log? – harrymc – 2009-10-24T17:56:31.557

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 – 2009-10-25T20:06:13.143

Answers

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

Posted 2009-10-24T17:09:41.027

Reputation: 9 646

MS is about to kill peer-to-peer sync so this information will be no longer accurate, by some time mid 2012. – Warren P – 2012-03-29T13:04:52.467

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 – 2012-04-11T15:46:43.690

nice followup/postmortem on the situation. – quack quixote – 2009-10-25T22:28:15.400

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 – 2009-10-29T10:39:16.830

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

Posted 2009-10-24T17:09:41.027

Reputation: 11 212