I'm giving my mom my old laptop so she can use it for work when she's not at the house. I'd like to give her the ability to easily synch files between the computers, which she will eventually probably want to synch her whole documents folder. she'll either be using one computer or the other, so a simple push-button synch would be fine for her, or so I think. what kind of programs are there out there for this purpose? would Live Mesh do the job? I'd rather it not be cloud-based, as that is overkill, to me. P2P-ish should be fine, where they synch from the same network

9/2/2011 7:17:15 PM

live mesh works very well, but lately ive been using dropbox or wuala

9/2/2011 11:12:52 PM

I'm a HUGE fan of livemesh on family computers. They can sync files (which does it peer to peer instead of waiting on it to bounce off a dropbox server - also unlimited size) and when junk hits the fan I can easily remote in and see whats up.

9/3/2011 12:02:36 AM

live mesh. it's not even push button. it just always stays synced. it's honestly pretty magical (after using it for years, im still amazed how it just works without any intervention)

[Edited on September 3, 2011 at 10:25 AM. Reason : .]

9/3/2011 10:24:17 AM

yeah, it's slow as fuck to sync right now. I dragged a folder with 200 files in it in a fairly shallow configuration before I went to bed last night and it STILL has 140 files to go.

9/3/2011 3:09:33 PM

My only gripe with live sync/mesh is that they dropped XP support. I understand why they did it but damnit my work computer still used XP so had to move to Dropbox.

Oh well I'm not working now anyways so all my computers now support mesh and im happy agian.

9/3/2011 11:39:26 PM

^^ live mesh is running slow? It was always blazing fast for me. I sync up about 2-3GB per day as a backup from my work machine.

9/5/2011 4:03:53 PM

well, Live Mesh officially sucks balls. it is constantly getting stuck on "Waiting to receive X files". WELL SEND THE GOD DAMN FILES. and the only way to fix it is to unsync the directory, delete the files, and then re-download the whole damn think. fucking useless

9/27/2011 3:48:11 PM

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

[Edited on September 27, 2011 at 4:22 PM. Reason : .]

9/27/2011 4:22:41 PM

^^you've got some bandwidth issues then, wwwebsurfer is right, mesh/sync is fast as shit. It'll eat up all the idle bandwidth/proc time available.

Now if you're running torrents or folding@home (or anything cpu/bw intensive) it will crawl because it only uses idle resources.

9/27/2011 6:33:31 PM

how is it a bandwidth issue when it's not even transferring anything. It's not saying "receiving X files." It's saying "waiting to receive X files" and then it never actually receives them. and some of the files it's waiting on aren't that big. we're talking KBs. just "waits to receive" them. I look at the task manager and it shows zero network usage, so it's not like I'm maxed out. And it's on a 10Mb line, so BW shouldn't be a problem at this point. nothing's running in the background. this seems to be a common issue with the software, too, after doing some googling.

9/27/2011 11:48:10 PM

I would be compelled to think you've got something screwy with your firewall or you don't have mesh configured correctly. I'm using it at 4 locations and sync GB's worth of files per day without a hitch, and it's always been worlds faster than dropbox or anything else for me.

Noen may know more; but it seems to do some kind of hashing to verify files. For instance when I first start up mesh (like if the computer restarted for an update) it will take 20-30 minutes for all the files to be verified. During this time is usually when it says it is 'waiting'. Once that verification occurs, however, it gets down to business and will pull down the files with the quickness. Also during this time it doesn't use much processor for me - but the hard drive will be grinding away.

My last suggestion would be to leave the program running for a day or two on both computers. It probably needs to generate that baseline index or something. And just let it run in the background. If you try to start it and expect files to immediately start transferring you're going to be very disappointed. You can't use it like a FTP program and just tell one to overwrite the other - it has to go through and verify everything on both ends before it will transfer.

9/28/2011 7:58:36 AM

I also have no issues using mesh. I use it for VS projects all the time.

9/28/2011 8:37:39 AM

SYNCTOY

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=15155

9/28/2011 11:31:46 AM

^^^ that's all fine and dandy, but it's a problem MS specifically knows about. It happened at two locations, so the firewall can't be a problem. it's just a shitty program that works some places and not others. Microsoft's solution? delete the synced folder and try again. I did that, it still hangs on the stupid "waiting to receive files" message.

http://www.google.com/search?q=windows+live+mesh+waiting+to+receive+files&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

9/28/2011 2:55:37 PM

well, now it's lookin like the network card is flaking out in the machine having the most problems. good luck to me trying to find a Mini PCI card to replace it with. i guess I'll just grab the same model off of ebay or something

9/28/2011 4:33:55 PM

^^^synctoy is an ancient precursor to Mesh.

^^it's not a shitty program.

Quote :

" For instance when I first start up mesh (like if the computer restarted for an update) it will take 20-30 minutes for all the files to be verified. During this time is usually when it says it is 'waiting'. Once that verification occurs, however, it gets down to business and will pull down the files with the quickness. Also during this time it doesn't use much processor for me - but the hard drive will be grinding away."

Yep. Basically Mesh uses a local SQL database on each machine, and has to build hash indices for each file. Everytime the filesystem changes, it has to resync the local db to ensure nothing is improperly overwritten/synced. Which is why it can take a considerable amount of time after a restart, or on first sync to actually start pushing files.

My home PC has ~200gbs and ~150,000 files under sync. It takes it almost 8 hours to fully rebuild the cache, because of the size of some files (large videos, non-zip archives, etc can take a while to process).

The reason for paying this penalty is because mesh is not integrated with the filesystem at all, it's a drop-on-top service. I'm personally hoping that Windows8 will have a mesh/sync like service built into the filesystem to avoid the hash/index problems.

9/28/2011 5:52:05 PM

well, why should it take so long to hash a file in the KB-size range, then? I just replaced the network card with a new one on a fresh install of Win7 and it is STILL doing the "waiting to receive X files" dance. what does that message mean? what is happening behind the scenes to cause that?

9/29/2011 12:29:41 PM

It's not just hashing, it's also building the SQL database.

9/30/2011 8:06:44 PM

look, I'm not asking it to sync the files in 5 minutes. I do think that within two days is a reasonable request, though, especially for it to stop "waiting to receive X files," especially after it's already fucking received most of the files. and what's it waiting on? files that are 93KB. how long does it take to put that in the SQL database?

[Edited on September 30, 2011 at 9:06 PM. Reason : ]

9/30/2011 9:05:03 PM

Microsoft synctoy is considered very good and it's free

10/1/2011 3:18:24 AM