I have officially dumped Live Mesh for Dropbox

Friday we had a nice lunch in the Office building at the Redmond Microsoft campus and afterwards we checked out some competitive demos. One of the products we were shown was Dropbox. I have been an animated supporter of Windows Live Mesh for quite awhile, but while I loved the functionality, and the freeness, it had some shortcomings that had started to become quite a bear.

My first gripe was that the Mac client was pretty unreliable, and lacked some of the features of the full client, such as Remote Desktop support.

In addition to that there were some general reliability problems with the PC client and a couple “would be nice to haves” that I missed.

After getting a nice demo of Dropbox and checking it out later, I realized that it did alot of what I was looking for. When I looked at the iPhone Application I was sold. I set up the free 2GB account and started tinkering.

I set it up on all of my Mac and PC machines, moved over all the files I traditionally managed with Mesh and started testing.

Impressions

Once the client is installed, Dropbox shows up as a set of folders right in your My Documents folder on a PC or inside your user folder on a Macintosh.

You can copy files in and out of that folder and the folder structure beneath it at will and all the machines you use will stay in check. You can also choose an alternate location upon installation.

The folder management on Mesh is a bear, I imagine taking a very simplified approach such as this would have reaped significant usability benefits. I will say however that allowing me to choose any folder to be shared with Mesh made keeping blogs drafts and wallpapers in sync quite easily. I’ll take that tradeoff though.

I should also mention that the web interface for Dropbox is considerably more functional and clean than the “Windows Desktop” metaphor Mesh uses.

The ability just move files quickly to a public location and get a direct link to them is invaluable. I am always needing to give someone a photo, a document or some other collection of files. This keeps me from dealing with mailbox limits, mail transport headaches or anything like that. I say share, copy a link, and paste it into IM or email it.

With the client application for iPhone I can take photos that are immediately stored on my PC, I can organize files and even view Office documents right on the phone. I tried that earlier with an Excel document and was amazed. After verifying this is the file I want, I can quickly send an email to a contact with a link to the file in question.

Ironically, the screenshot you see to the left was taken on the iPhone and inserted into this blog right from my Dropbox folder, that’s some pretty nice integration!

Price

I realized that this service will be very valuable, so I upgraded to the Pro 50 account. For $9.99/mo. I get 50GB of storage for my synced files. When you travel as much as me and share between so many different machines on different operating systems, this type of service is invaluable.

They also offer a Pro 100 account with 100GB of storage for $19.99 per month.

Final Thoughts

What makes this so different from Mesh to me? For starters, versioning. I can get back to any previous iteration of a file I have saved in the last 30 days. For a $3.99 surcharge you can have unlimited versioning.

The other major difference is that Dropbox is intended for people who need to share files. I want my files in sync, but I also want to be able to get them to other people in a moment’s notice. The iPhone application gives me the ability to go “here is the file you just asked for” and provide access on the spot.

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