I was travelling this past week and realized that I had copied a shortcut, not an actual file, of the powerpoint presentation that I was using for my talk ("Defining the -ette in Geekette") at the NOVA Girl Geek Dinner.

So I used RDP to connect to my computer at home but for some reason was unable to copy and paste the file from the RDP session to my laptop.

I then opened up Outlook on the desktop and tried emailing myself the 10MB file (lots of pictures in the deck). It was taking too long. So finally I opened up my FTP program and shoved the file onto my FTP server, then pulled it down to my laptop.

What a drag!

I did all this at the home of Microsoft Developer Evangelist Andrew Duthie's house while he was waiting to drive me to the meeting. When I finally jumped into the car, Andrew asked "You don't use Live Mesh?" and promised to show it to me later.

I had seen Live Mesh a year ago at the Mix n Mash even and thought it was very cool but I have been so very heads down in my book that I haven't paid a lot of attention to other things. Silly me.

In a nutshell, Live Mesh provides a network hub with 5 GB of space that you can connect to from various machines. You need to install its software onto your computer (Win XP or Vista) then you can synch folders from a computer (onto Microsoft's ginormous servers) and then synch the folder down to another computer. So for example, at home you can synch folders (oh, like maybe "my presentations that I need when I'm travelling") so that if you find yourself having done something dopey (oh, like maybe copying a shortcut rather than an actual file onto your mobile pc) you can just sign into your live mesh account and synch any folders you need down to your mobile pc.

And that's if you just want to use it for your own purposes. You can also use it to share files with others.

I have always been pretty skeptical about the security of such things, but how is this any different than using my hosted server?

LiveMesh is one of the services that sits on top of Windows Azure. It's part of Live Services in the stack shown in this Microsoft image.

Live Mesh is in Beta and its free. When I went to set it up, I discovered that I had an account there because I must have looked at it last year when I first learned about it. So, it took me a year to get back to it, but now I've set up my two desktops and my laptop to be part of a mesh and rather than copying files like mad before I head off for the holidays (not knowing which files I'll need, so I have to take lots of them). I'll resynch the designated folders from my desktop and my dev machine to my mesh and if I need any of them on my laptop, I'll just grab them from the mesh.

Sounds like a plan to me.