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The potential of Live Mesh is limitless...

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…but today’s implementation is not ;) Our underlying platform is designed to enable a wide range of scenarios, at broad Internet scale. We closely watch the feedback from our Technology Preview users along with the health and performance of the service, using it to continually improve the system and ramp up our scale.

As we go through this process, we’re hearing your questions about how many folders and files users can put in Live Mesh today. Here’s a quick summary of the upper bounds we’re testing against ourselves at the moment – we’ll expect these numbers to keep going up with subsequent service updates. [UPDATE: these are not limits that are hard coded into the system. They are boundary guidelines we've established based on internal and external feedback, and we're confident that anything under these boundaries will work well for all users. Because they are not hard coded limits, you can exceed these boundaries, and at that point your mileage may vary. Feel free to certify and share your own success stories...and stay tuned as we will definitely increase these boundaries/guidelines as we complete further tuning and testing.]

  • Size we've currently tested for contents in a single Live Folder: 10GB 17GB 40GB (go Mesh test team go!) (of course there’s still the 5GB quota which limits how much you can synchronize with the Live Desktop)
  • Individual file size: 2GB
  • Items (file or folders) per Live Folder: 100,000
  • Members per Live Folder: 200
  • Number of Live Folders per user: 200
  • Number of devices per user: 100

Technorati Tags: LiveMesh

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2008
    100 Device types is great, but as of today, LiveMesh only supports three - XP and Vista (32 and 64 bit) clients.  In the future, will the LiveMesh team be the only group with the ability to develop new device clients or will you expose this through some API so others outside of MS can create their own? By the way, I'm excited for this platform and I think you are doing a great job on it.  But I would love to see more for developers earlier on so we can get started on it now.  ;-)

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2008
    I just signed up for Mesh. I am very intrigued but I also wonder where this fits with Live Hotmail and Spaces. What sort of integration can we expect down the road? What are some of your plans or hopes?  How do plans for Mesh compare in scope to something like Jungle Disk and other Amazon services that are a further along in development and features?

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2008
    "Size of all contents in a single Live Folder: 10GB " Does this include (or imply?) P2P synchronization?  My music and pictures folders don't seem to be doing so well in that regard, but they combine to about 60 GB.  Live Mesh on the notebook begins synchronizing when it starts but stops after a while until I restart the app (it will still say it's synchronizing but isn't actually continuing to do anything).  This is over a LAN.

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2008
    When will live mesh work with xbox live zune skydrive.

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2008
    I see to many restrictions already. I thought we got promised earlier, NOT to have a filesize limit, or it's number of files. And how about the number of files in subfolders, is that counted with the topfolder? I mean, 100,000 files seems alot, but when creating websites, with the neccisary backups and stuff, 100,000 files still seems a close limit. And why just 2GB in filesize? I know it's a protections so I'm not going to share illegal dvd's or something, but then make it possible for private usage. And why just 10GB for one folder? I'm not sure what size the live desktop will get when RTM'ed, but limiting how I can use my space brings down the freedom that you just created with Live Mesh.

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2008
    Hey guys I just wanted to say congratulations on a great platform in development. This is one MS product I am truly excited about now. Okay that's not entirely honest. I am excited about quite a few other MS projects. Looking forward to these...

  1. More space availability, even if we have to pay for it.
  2. Apps in Live Desktop? Outlook lite? Calendar? Word processor? To-do list?
  3. Version-ing maybe? Can certain folders be synced in versions? Maybe enable a roll-back to a certain date to recover an early version of a file or a deleted copy? Even if you had this as a paid feature, you would have SOMETHING there. Thanks guys. Getting MUCH use out of the current beta. KUDOS!!!

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    The Live Mesh guys posted some interesting information about the technical limitations of the current

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    One thing I would like to see in Live Mesh is the ability to remotely access not only own machines but also machines of other users (via invitation etc.). That could beat the logmein.com service!

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    Thanks for the clarifications. I look forward to seeing the limits go !!

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    Delta copy, delta copy, delta copy. I can't see any issue other than this being that important at this point.  We're wasting so much bandwidth sending the same bits again and again.

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    @ Charlie Bowen, For more on how we see the future of Live Mesh you might want to look at ReadWriteWeb's interview with Brian Hall (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/live_mesh_windows_live_integration.php).  We'll also have more to say about the developer side of Live Mesh at PDC in October (see https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx for a preview). Thanks for your interest!

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    @ Mark Sowul, Hopefully our update clarified things a bit.  10GB is the upper bounds that we're currently testing against ourselves.  You can (as you have) exceed that, but it may not be the greatest experience yet (and it sounds like it hasn't been for you).  We are, of course, constantly working to improve this.

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    @ csmba, You can choose which folders sync with your Live Desktop or not by going to the Live Desktop, right-clicking a folder, and changing its sync settings. We do plan to support member roles in the future, as you note.  The idea to assign a role to an entire device - to have one-way syncs, as you say - is a nice one that we've seen a few times from other customers.  I'll add your vote for this feature to our internal list of suggestions.  Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    I'd see potential to sync DVR-MS (Media Center Recorded TV), which are in general more than 2GB. The biggest I'd ever seen is 18GB, but they are usually 4-8GB.

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    According to a recent post in the official blog of Live Mesh, the following is a quick summary of the

  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2008
    I'm using the P2P functionality to sync my wife's pictures from her photography business, it's about 50GB of files. Performance is dreadfuly slow (click on the folder, go make a sandwich, come back) but aside from the slowness it functions just as expected. Hopefully as the beta goes on they'll find a way to speed it up, but even so it is encouraging to see that even in Live Mesh's early stage it still at least works exactly as expected.

  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2008
    Why Live Mesh can not be entirely written in C#? Why MOE Monitor And  Mesh Operating Environments are written in c++ and rest of application is wrriten in c#? Is because of performance? Or better integration with the operating system?? And in the future we can customize the many settings of Live Mesh have pre configured? Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2008
    @ Pauly, Sorry for the belated reply. The 100 number is actually for the number of devices you can claim in your own mesh, not device types.  But yes, we expect to have a wide range of devices interacting Live Mesh, and we’ll have more to say at PDC about how 3rd party developers can have their devices integrate with Live Mesh.  You might want to take a look at https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2008
    @ Thiago, We use managed code extensively in both our client and services.  There are some places where native code has to be used, though – for example, in writing integration with the Windows Explorer shell or the display driver integration for Live Remote Desktop.  As for customized settings, we’re always looking at new features that customers would appreciate, so please add specific suggestions to the forums' Wish List: http://forums.community.microsoft.com/en/LiveMesh/thread/dd382356-bea0-490d-bfbd-1260224f3846