Windows Live Sync Wave 4 Beta: Some Improvements, Some Big Problems [Archive]

View Full Version : Windows Live Sync Wave 4 Beta: Some Improvements, Some Big Problems

Jason Dunn

06-29-2010, 03:46 AM

<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1277751172.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb; float: left; margin: 10px;" />If you haven't already checked out the new <a href="http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta" target="_blank">Windows Live Essentials Beta</a> (also known as Windows Live Wave 4), you should - it's definitely worth a look.The new Windows Live Mail client is a quantum leap forward - the speed improvements they made to IMAP accounts alone make it worth the upgrade. Windows Live Movie Maker is also <a href="http://www.zunethoughts.com/news/show/98636/zune-hd-and-windows-phone-output-profile-now-included-in-windows-live-movie-maker.html" target="_blank">much-improved, with Zune HD, Windows Phone</a>, and custom output profiles. Windows Live Sync, what I believe is the most underrated part of the Windows Live suite, has finally received a huge update that's long overdue. Year after year, Windows Live Sync - formerly known as Foldershare, created by Byte Taxi and purchased by Microsoft in 2005 - limped along with nary an improvement to the user interface in sight. That's finally changed...but not all of it is good. <MORE />First, the good news: you can do pretty much everything from the desktop client. It's been completely re-designed, with a far less cryptic user interface. From within the desktop client, you can select a folder you want to sync, and select the computer you want to sync it with (the other machine has to have Live Sync installed already of course). It's even smart enough to put the folder in the same place on the other computer. For instance, I have a folder called Workspace that I keep on the desktop of every computer. I use Live Sync to keep that folder in sync amongst all of my machines, which allows me to maintain an active workflow no matter which system I use. In previous versions of Live Sync, to set that up I'd have to do a lot of drilling-down in the Web based interface. With the Wave 4 beta, I just select the computer I want the folder to show up on, and boom, it gets synched over to the same location on the new machine. Brilliant!Another hugely welcome change is the fact that libraries can how have up to 100,000 files in them, up from 20,000. This is great news, because it means I can now put my photo collection back together; I had to break my photos up into two separate master folders when I broke past 20,000 total photos. The new 100K limit should keep me happy for at least a few years.Now for the bad news: initial sync performance is, in a word, abysmal. I set up Live Sync on my Dell Vostro V13 after re-installing Windows 7 (long story), and set it to sync my 25K pictures from a desktop PC. The laptop had a solid wireless connection at 54mbps, and both the laptop and desktop were set to stay turned on for three hours. I've done this 10+ times with the previous Live Sync client, and in the morning I always saw that all the files were synced over.Imagine my surprise when I turned on the laptop this morning and less than 3000 photos had synched over! Worse, Microsoft has removed all real data from the status indicator - all it says now is "Syching". There's no indication of the speed at which the sync is processing (which was critical for ensuring that your LAN sync was going at the right speeds), there's no real-time view of the files as they sync (which allowed you to peg files that were causing problems), and there's no estimation of when it will be complete. All you can do is sit and watch the running total of synced/un-synched files.As of 6pm my local time, this sync had been running for eight hours, and it still has 16K or so images to sync. It would have been faster for me to copy over all the images using an external hard drive - but even then, Live Sync would foil my plans. How? Because on another computer I'm doing a straight My Documents to My Documents sync from my main workstation. Minutes before I started the sync, both computers were running the previous version of Live Sync, and thus have identical directory contents. In previous versions of Live Sync, it would do a file-by-file comparison and recognize the files were identical - this process would only take a few minutes for thousands of files. For some reason, Live Sync seems to be re-synching all the files from scratch...yet there's no indication that any duplicates are being created.Live Sync is also a resource-heavy process now - previously, beyond the initial scan after a reboot which would send the hard drive into heavy read mode, Live Sync had a fairly light touch. Now, even when doing an initial sync between two folders where the files are identical, it's a process that will consume up to 7 MB/s of hard drive throughput. This makes for a sluggish system, and if you have thousands of files, expect the process to take hours - so you'll have a bogged-down system for a long time. If you've kicked off multiple large libraries to sync, it will be even more resource-intensive - on one of my systems I started both a My Documents sync and a My Pictures sync, and the hard drive has been grinding away at 10 MB/s for hours.If it sounds like this mini-review has turned more negative than when it first started, it's because I've worked on it over the course of the day, and have been baffled staring at the "Processing Changes" messages for hours on end. While I appreciate the excellent new UI that Live Sync now features, the performance - both from a server and client level - is atrocious and I have to wonder what sort of testing the Live Sync team did before they released it. I can't imagine anyone thinking that this level of performance is acceptable. Sure, this is a beta, but I expect better from the Windows Live team.My advice? Since the old Live Sync continues to work for now, wait a few weeks until the Live Sync team solves some of these performance issues - and, let's face it, some of the performance issues right now are due to people like me installing the new client and slamming the Live Sync servers with 40,000+ file sync requests to process, multiplied by several computers. The Live Sync servers can't cope with the load right now, so give them some time to deal with us early adopters.Or wait until this new version of Live Sync exits beta when, hopefully the team can raise the performance bar much higher.UPDATE: Since writing this article, Live Sync has continued to infuriate me. It's surprisingly CPU intensive when doing a scan/sync, and it won't sync hidden files. That means that every time I create a new folder of photos, and Picasa scans it, Live Sync refuses to sync the hidden picasa.ini file until I find the file and set the status to non-hidden. It's also exceedingly irritating that it will report that it's waiting to receive "x" number of files, but it won't tell you which client has those files - so your only option is to boot up every computer with Live Sync on it and let the clients get back into sync. I have one computer running Live Sync 24/7 that never shuts off, so this problem should never happen - it certainly never happened with the previous version of Live Sync. Lastly, the server performance continues to be awful - the other night at 2 AM I sat there watching two computers running Live Sync report that they needed to sync 65 files...but after 15 minutes, not a single file had synched (and they were just JPEGs). This product is a performance disaster and should be avoided for now.Jason Dunn owns and operates <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com/" target="_blank">Thoughts Media Inc.</a>, a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys <a href="http://photos.jasondunn.com/" target="_blank">photography</a>, mobile devices, <a href="http://www.jasondunn.com/" target="_blank">blogging</a>, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his wonderful son, and his sometimes obedient dog. He wishes SSDs were much cheaper, and much bigger.<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//ppct/auto/1240336793.usr1.gif" />Do you enjoy using new hardware, software and accessories, then sharing your experience with others? Then join us on the <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com/reviewteam.php" target="_blank">Thoughts Media Review Team</a>! We're looking for individuals who find it fun to test new gear and give their honest opinions about the experience. It's a volunteer role with some great perks. Interested? <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com/reviewteam.php" target="_blank">Then click here for more information.</a><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//ppct/auto/1240336793.usr1.gif" />

Jason Dunn

06-29-2010, 05:44 AM

A further note: the old Live Sync would send from multiple computers. So if you had two computers online with all the files, and a third signed on and needed the new files, both computers would cooperate to send the new files. Now I'm watching as my laptop requires 7300+ new files, but only one of the PCs is sending the files...the other one simply says "Up to Date". Removing this feature makes Live Sync much less efficient are quickly populating a machine with updated files. :mad:

Hooch Tan

06-29-2010, 02:13 PM

Ouch. The performance and cpu utilization issues are enough for me to keep things as they are. While I do not need "real-time" updating of my files, I like them there within a reasonable amount of time. And while I also have computers that are multi-core and capable of handling the odd high load, what's the point? This is file syncrhonization, not video rendering. Thanks for the heads up!

ptyork

06-29-2010, 03:19 PM

Honestly, the whole mess is pretty pathetic. They dumped the FolderShare stuff entirely and replaced it with their DOG Live Mesh experiment. Totally different technology, but "better" because it is based on "standard" RSS instead of a much more efficient custom protocol. Also "better" because it piles on loads of features you don't want or need (like YET ANOTHER way to remote desktop into your PC). This is yet another case of Microsoft making really, really poor decisions. Mesh had some potential as a cool development PLATFORM, but it was never going to be efficient. To drop all of the platform potential and relegate it only to file sync, something it only did marginally well, is really a worst-of-both-worlds scenario.

By the way, don't expect this to get much better. Live Mesh has been out for years and has always sucked from a performance perspective. Just be happy that it bypasses the internet for local syncing at all. Earlier beta's didn't offer this, meaning that every synced file had to go first to the cloud and then back to a local PC--even if the files weren't meant to be synced to the cloud.

FolderShare / Live Sync v1 was a little bit limited, but it worked well. They could have just upped the file limit, added Sky Drive as a sync target, and maybe added the local GUI configuration utilities and it would have been an awesome upgrade. Sadly, it's a lame-duck product now (I think the servers are going away completely in a year).

Time for you to write another photobook-type review for file sync providers. :)

Jason Dunn

06-29-2010, 05:51 PM

OK, on the plus side, once a folder has been completely processed, it's REALLY fast to update new files. I dragged a song into my Workspace folder, and in under one second (as in, instantly) it was communicating with the server telling it there was a new file. That's a significant improvement over previous versions of Live Sync. After a few seconds, it kicked off the transfer to the other PCs...but I still miss not having any sort of progress indicator, speed of transfer, etc...

Jason Dunn

06-29-2010, 05:52 PM

This is file syncrhonization, not video rendering. Thanks for the heads up!

It seems like, based on my newer tests, that the heavy load is only for the initial sync - but you're right, file sync isn't video rendering, and it shouldn't be so strain-inducing on a PC.

Jason Dunn

06-29-2010, 05:58 PM

FolderShare / Live Sync v1 was a little bit limited, but it worked well. They could have just upped the file limit, added Sky Drive as a sync target, and maybe added the local GUI configuration utilities and it would have been an awesome upgrade. Sadly, it's a lame-duck product now (I think the servers are going away completely in a year).

I don't know enough about the back end to state whether it would have been as easy as you say - I know that FolderShare was built on Linux, and much of the work that Microsoft did over the years, the work that no one really saw, was porting things over to the Windows world. Something tells me that with this release they made some major back end changes because bumping library sizes from 20K to 100K is no small matter.

You mention the servers "going away" - how would this product work without a centralized server to coordinate sync? Pure peer to peer?

Time for you to write another photobook-type review for file sync providers. :)

Haha...I doubt that will happen! :eek: Over the years I've looked at various file sync solutions - basically every time Live Sync tanked and stopped working - and I never found one that did it the "right" way. SugarSync came close, but they want to store everything in the cloud as well and charge you lots of money for it. I already have all my data backed up in the cloud, so I only want a peer to peer solution. Is there a really strong competitor to Live Sync out there that you recommend?

Hooch Tan

06-29-2010, 07:17 PM

It seems like, based on my newer tests, that the heavy load is only for the initial sync - but you're right, file sync isn't video rendering, and it shouldn't be so strain-inducing on a PC.

From what you're reporting, it sort of sounds like they set the program up to be really aggressive in terms of updating, which might explain the high cpu load. Upon reflection, it also seems like they made the assumption that people using the system are new sign ups instead of "upgrades."

I agree with your comment to ptyork. There are lots of file syncing solutions out there, but most use the cloud in one fashion or another, where Live Sync is the only one I've found as well that does it completely peer to peer (except for the initial communication that is) without exposing your data to anyone else.

Jason Dunn

06-29-2010, 07:55 PM

From what you're reporting, it sort of sounds like they set the program up to be really aggressive in terms of updating, which might explain the high cpu load.

I double-checked my article, and I never mention high CPU usage - it's disk usage that's the big burden during the initial sync. CPU usage was kept around 10% or so, meaning not much. When there's no sync happening, it uses 0% CPU at idle and 22 MB of RAM. Pretty good I'd say!

Upon reflection, it also seems like they made the assumption that people using the system are new sign ups instead of "upgrades."

I think it may be more that they've transitioned to a completely new back-end system...that's the only reason I can think of for a completely hard break with the older system. And that's something I forgot to mention is a hassle as well: you'll need to uninstall the old software, and re-set up the sync relationships everywhere from scratch. Ugg. :mad:

Jason Dunn

06-29-2010, 08:38 PM

ptyork

06-29-2010, 10:29 PM

You mention the servers "going away" - how would this product work without a centralized server to coordinate sync? Pure peer to peer?

The old FolderSync servers are going away, so the old version of Live Sync will stop working. The new, Mesh-based system still requires servers, just different ones. They are TOTALLY different technologies (not just UNIX vs. Windows) and thus require completely different servers.

Is there a really strong competitor to Live Sync out there that you recommend?

That's what you're for, right? :)

No, I know of no others off hand. I'm pretty sure that you are 100% correct in that FolderSync was unique in it's simple, low overhead, focused approach to syncing files. FWIW, I've always used SyncToy (scheduled) for local sync and FolderSync / Live Sync for remote syncs. I kind of like the delay in the syncing as it allows me to screw up (bad rename, deleted file, etc.) and still easily recover before the sync happens.

Jason Dunn

06-29-2010, 10:31 PM

The old FolderSync servers are going away, so the old version of Live Sync will stop working. The new, Mesh-based system still requires servers, just different ones.

Ah, OK then. I thought your statement was a little crazy at first glance. ;)

ptyork

06-30-2010, 07:10 AM

Nice write-up about how to set it up, etc. here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/20509/sync-files-between-computers-skydrive-with-windows-live-sync-beta

100% confirmed now that this is based off the Mesh system...which further explains the whole "start over" mentality of the system.

Uugh!!! Still has the "can't sync hidden files" bug that I submitted well over a year ago. That is the reason I stopped using Mesh in the first place (well that and the overall doggishness of the thing). It makes it completely impossible to synchronize a development workspace between to computers if you are using a version control package like Subversion. They use hidden files and folders to store meta-data about the files that are being versioned and if they aren't synced, you are basically hosed. It would be so easy to fix this problem, and one that should never have been a problem. Again something that FolderShare did right so many years ago...

I'm also really concerned about the whole "don't select a destination folder" thing. I know for sure that there are files that I keep in different locations at home and at work. Also, what about different user names?? Will c:\users\me\Documents automatically map to c:\users\meatwork\Documents? Seems quite unlikely, and kludgy at best. What if I'm syncing something from an E: drive to a computer with only a single partition? What about on a Mac? How do you specify folder locations there? I'm really more and more disappointed with this the more I read. There is now going to be a gaping hole in the market for a decent distributed sync solution.

The way my posts read on this site, you must think I'm a bitter person. I'm really not. :)

Eriq Cook

06-30-2010, 03:22 PM

I've been waiting for MS to get it right in the sync arena. I was getting ready to test Live sync then saw your article. From what you're saying this would be a step backwards from the Offline Files feature.

I've been using the Offline Files sync feature since Vista. They finally worked out some major kinks (like very high CPU usage) in Windows 7, but it still has a ways to go. Good news is that I now have 3 computers synced with the same data (100,000+ files) and seems to work well. It also syncs hidden files/folders.

It's still not very user-friendly in my opinion though, but it is a great alternative if you're using Windows 7 (or Vista, although I hate using that word LOL) Pro or Ultimate.

Jason Dunn

06-30-2010, 07:35 PM

Uugh!!! Still has the "can't sync hidden files" bug that I submitted well over a year ago...Again something that FolderShare did right so many years ago...

Funny, I was coming back to this thread to report that very thing - that it won't sync hidden files. I don't know that Foldershare did it "right" - they'd strip the hidden attribute, making it visible, but at least they'd sync it. It's definitely a step backward to not sync it at all.

I use Picasa, and it stores all sorts of info in picasa.ini files - one per folder. These files are normally hidden, but with previous versions of Live Sync, they were made visible, which wasn't such a bad thing because they were kept in sync across all my systems. I found a work-around: I did a search for picasa.ini in My Pictures, selected them all, and toggled them all to visible. I don't know if this is a but in Windows 7 or what, but toggling the hidden checkbox didn't do the trick - I had to make them hidden AND read only, then toggle them all back to non-hidden and non-read only.

I'm also really concerned about the whole "don't select a destination folder" thing.

I explained that poorly - you can select a destination folder from the computer it's going to sync to, just like before. When you set up the sync, and it asks you where you want to sync to, you just click OK - meaning don't sync anywhere yet. Then you go to the other PC and tell it where to sync. It works great.

cdmoye

07-13-2010, 02:43 PM

Jason Dunn

07-15-2010, 12:20 AM

Maybe I'm missing it. It sure was easy with the old version of Live Sync, but I can't see where/how (logged in to machine #2) to select the destination folder to sync. My files are in different places on these two boxes, so it's pretty key to pick the target folder.

Click on where it says LOCATION - expand the folder and you should see it. A pop-up window will appear, and you just pick the folder you want...