

My Windows Live Mesh Cluster Fail - cincinnatus
http://pantuso.com/2010/11/21/windows-live-mesh-cluster-fail/

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Groxx
This reads like it could be a good ad for Dropbox. That version would've been
in the file's history. A 5 second repair-job.

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SoftwareMaven
My thoughts closely aligned to this, "What, Mesh doesn't provide access to the
previous versions?" That is a huge part of the reason I trust Dropbox so
completely. They've got my back in case they do screw up.

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Z3UX
I use Live Mesh and this happened to me once but every time it syncs, it moves
the "old" file to the recycle bin... It just doesn't deletes it! I have to
manually delete it, so if shit happens, I can always just look in the recycle
bin. Did you search there? =\

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kenjackson
That's pretty horrible. I must admit that I haven't "upgraded" to the new
version of Mesh yet, due to concerns with it. First, it's not really Mesh --
it's Sync, with a name change. Second, the original Mesh was architected by
Abolade Gbadegesin, probably one of the best architects in the industry you
haven't heard of (and now an architect on WP7). I don't know who did
Sync/Mesh.

I do wonder what would cause such an issue. You'd think that simple timestamps
would catch this issue. I wonder if the original poster changed his clock to
match the time for this Ignite conference and that screwed everythign up?

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sjs
Comparing dates that aren't UTC is a pretty amateur mistake. Comparing
timestamps alone is a mistake too.

It doesn't really matter why it broke to be honest, something like that has to
be perfect or it's useless. After it breaks for someone it's impossible to
trust the system again, negating any benefits. Once bitten twice shy.

They should have done their homework on distributed systems and used something
like a vector clock. MS has lots of resources and absolutely no excuse for
fucking this up. Especially since small startups have made similar services
that actually work.

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cma
Re vector clocks, Microsoft even employs Leslie Lamport

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kenjackson
He does work at MS, although I don't think vector clocks help here
necessarily. I think a strict vector clock implementation _may_ simply tell
you that there is no strict ordering in this case, as you had two independent
events with no synchronization ocurring between the two (if we take the worst
case scenario where they both go online to the service at the same time).

UTC timestamps would solve the issue, unless you lied about your UTC time
(hence the time change question).

I must say, unlike the first respondant to my post, while I agree it should
never happen -- I think understanding why it did is interesting in of itself.
But I'm just one of those people who likes understanding how people make
mistakes in software.

~~~
sjs
I don't know enough here to say anything definitively, but I think knowing
there's a conflict is half the battle. UTC timestamps are great but clocks
have to be perfectly in sync which is unlikely even w/ NTP. And as you
mentioned doesn't withstand users changing their system time.

Sometimes bubbling conflict resolution up to the user is a good idea. It's
preferable to data loss.

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sriramk
I'll send this to the Live Mesh team

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forgotAgain
> _Through the past three years of interminable beta, apparent lack of
> resources from the Mesh team and/or indifference from management at
> Microsoft. The complete failure to push forward a product that had huge
> promise_

You're running a business and even after three years of heartbreak you don't
have an emergency backup in place?

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cincinnatus
Ignite is my hobby. My business stuff is all in a VCS which is in turn backed
up in duplicate.

And again, in theory Mesh _is_ a backup because it is supposed to duplicate
things across multiple machines. The heartbreak wasn't at it not working (in
the past), it was at the total lack of apparent support by the powers that be
at MS and understanding of what they had on their hands and its strategic
importance in keeping the desktop relevant against the tide of 'in the cloud'.

~~~
Lagged2Death
I'm not a serious IT person, but I imagine a serious IT person would draw a
distinction between synchronization systems (like Windows Mesh/Sync, database
replication systems, RAID 1, source control systems etc) and true backup
systems that create more-or-less non-editable snapshots of the data in
question.

Simply because the sync systems can turn against you and amplify your own
mistakes, deleting or altering all the copies of something, even when the
deletion or alteration was in error. Real backup systems make that sort of
mistake much more difficult or even impossible (in the case of write-once
media). Certainly, both types of systems can save your bacon, but not in
exactly the same situations.

In any case, though, thanks for sharing your experience.

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Andrewski
This is what happens when a PowerPoint presentation is your presentation.
PowerPoint should be an aid to a presentation, not the whole shebang.

You should be prepared to give a presentation even if the power goes out and
you have to go by candlelight. do not rely on visual aids and make your
audience wait if they fail.

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dholowiski
The words duh, and backup both came to mind when reading this article. When I
do computer repair, I always carry 2 verified copies of all my softwAre tools
on two different mediums. With a file like this, why wouldn't you verify it
before the event, and bring the file multiple ways- mesh, email, flash drive
and cd?

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rbanffy
While I understand something like real backups would have helped this guy, to
someone not intimate with the technology, Live Mesh looks like something that
replicates your files on many places, something that sounds similar to
backups.

I keep my important stuff versioned on subversion, running off a ZFS RAID-Z
with weekly snapshots and daily diffs shipped to a different machine on a
different site. If something goes wrong with the backups, I get texted in
minutes.

I hope to be able to migrate that to BtrFS someday. Will take some work.

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joelhaasnoot
Sounds horrible, for that exact reason I use SugarSync and Live Mesh together
to have stuff on multiple platforms. And I email lots of things to gmail: very
easy with the drag and drop support in Chrome.

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u48998
SugarSync is not bad either, 5GB for free compared to Dropbox's 2.

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Groxx
It _seriously_ dislikes my Truecrypted work file. Uploaded it once, won't
touch it again, no matter how many changes I make. Emailed support, they said
it wasn't uploading because Truecrypt was accessing it, but it ignores it even
when it's not running.

Haven't tried it with Dropbox, though; maybe I should.

