Live Mesh & The Cloud

It’s been an interesting few months. After trying out a number of multi-computer synchronisation tools (like SugarSync, DropBox, etc) and settling on the Live Mesh beta, it’s time to rethink the approach because there still appear to be basic bugs with even Live Mesh that lead to uncertainty in the consistency of the synchronised files.

Here’s what I have experienced and what I am doing to mitigate things. It would be interesting to hear your experiences (using any similar products) so feel free to post below.

For the past couple of months, there has been a nagging doubt about Live Mesh. Occasionally, a few files were continually flagged as having a synchronisation conflicts – meaning Live Mesh thought that the file had been updated on two separate devices (computers) in between separate synchronisations. This meant that Live Mesh kept multiple copies of the files so that I could manually merge the changes and ensure I had the latest version. However, despite doing a manual merge, Live Mesh kept insisting that there was still a conflict even though I knew for definite that there was not.

This problem sewed the seeds of doubt about the thousands of other files I had under the watchful eye of the Mesh.

I also discovered that some files – particularly my website source code – was not always being synchronised and some websites were missing from different devices in my Mesh. Sadly, this meant that I could not depend on Live Mesh for day-to-day work. I understand that Live Mesh is still beta, so there will be teething problems, but Microsoft’s recent suggestion that the Live Mesh system is going to be more about “plumbing” rather than direct customer facing tools suggests that there may be a move away from what we currently experience in the beta.

So, what to do? Back to the beginning …

My ultimate goal is to be able to access my files wherever I am, and ensure I am working on the latest copy of the file. I have two principle types of files I work on – documents and websites – and while the basic need is the same, the way they are managed is better separated into version control for the websites, and simple access for documents. This means that I need a virtual disk in the Cloud for most of the documents – which I already had with Live Mesh, but was instead relying on the flawed synchronisation functions – and a hosted version control system.

Since we work with Rackspace at Emissary and Rackspace have a range of Cloud offerings, we asked if they had anything that could integrate desktop access directly with cloud storage (there was nothing that enabled this with Live Mesh). The original plan was to link my desktop with the existing cloud storage available to Emissary through our existing contracts with Rackspace, but they mentioned Jungledisk (which, incidentally, Rackspace purchased earlier in the year) and a couple of other systems, and so I did some further research.

Jungledisk hosts the files in the Rackspace Cloud, and while it is currently US-based there are plans to roll out global data centres over time (which will mean quicker access from anywhere on the planet). Our experience as a company with Rackspace has been exceptional and the pricing model for Jungledisk was good – several Gb of files meant about USD3 per month and backup was provided. I trust Rackspace more than I do Live Mesh and decided to move my files from one Cloud to another. It took a while copying everything across (and resolving the conflict and missing file issues that Live Mesh had introduced), but I now have a complete working library in the Cloud which I can access directly from any computer with Jungledisk installed, or via a web interface.

The downside is that even with high-speed Internet, some large files can be slow to access at first, but the built-in local caching of Jungledisk takes care of this and file access is the same as if the file were local once you access it a couple of times.

The next challenge was to find hosted version control for the website code. For this I looked at hosted subversion (or SVN). There are a number of hosted SVN providers, and there are some free tools (e.g. TortoiseSVN) which provide integration between local PC-based code libraries and Cloud-based SVN. At present, I haven’t settled on one complete solution, but am currently leaning towards migrating to the Zend Studio IDE (away from NuSphere phpED) as it has integrated SVN management and works on a Mac, plus Beanstalk as a hosted SVN (because it sits on top of the Rackspace Cloud). Hosted SVN also has the benefit of allowing easier management and sharing of code between a virtual team of developers by creating a central company repository without needing to physically port/merge files or set up VPNs.

(If you have any experiences or recommendations for hosted SVN and associated PHP IDE tools, please comment below. Thanks.)

So what of Live Mesh?

I am still using it to sync my music library peer-to-peer. The music library as a whole does not change often, so I feel it is relatively safe to commit to Live Mesh. It is also easy to check if albums are complete on each device!

The end result is a hybrid of different solutions to manage different types of files as there is not one tool to rule them all (at the moment).

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