Why is this more powerful? Because Remote Fetch only lets you get files from one PC. While the SkyDrive app enables a nice Remote Fetch feature that lets you browse a remote PC’s file system, Live Mesh includes a much more powerful remote desktop feature. That’s because a SkyDrive full with 125 GB of content (the 100 GB plan plus the free 25 GB of storage for those who are grandfathered in) will exceed the storage capacity of the 128 GB SSD that is found in most of today’s portable computers. So if you buy extra storage, and then actually have the temerity to fill it up, you may not be able to use the SkyDrive application at all. There’s no way to configure it to sync just parts of it. When you install the SkyDrive app, you are forced to sync everything from SkyDrive to your PC.
For example, I have a folder called Favorites I sync to my Pictures folder on the PC and folders like Docs, Work, and Windows 8 Secrets (among others) that I sync to Documents. With Live Mesh, you can sync as many folders as you like, and on each PC you can determine where these folders appear in the file system. With the SkyDrive (and Google Drive, and Dropbox) app, you can sync one folder and one folder only between the online service and your PC, and it represents the entire collection of contents in the online service. For that to happen, however, SkyDrive needs to pick up some missing features that still make Live Mesh the better solution for many. It’s a bit early for that, though truth be told I do expect Microsoft to eventually kill off Live Mesh. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the future of Live Mesh, whether this SkyDrive application means that Live Mesh will soon disappear, and so on. This wasn’t obvious at first since Microsoft already had a service, Windows Live Mesh, which was in many ways superior to Dropbox. In the wake of this week’s surprisingly similar releases of the SkyDrive and Google Drive applications for Windows, it’s now clearer that both companies have the same service, Dropbox, in their sights.
0 kommentar(er)
