One Computer in Two or More Live Mesh Accounts

I’m a huge fan of Windows Live Mesh and it’s completely revolutionised the way I store my files. When my x300 solid state hard disk died it was a life saver. Whilst I do use Windows Home Server to backup my machine. The backup can still be a few days old. But Mesh is rarely more than a few minutes out of date. One thing that has bugged me is how to make the best use of it. Especially in a multiple computer household. It’s really common for the computer at home to be shared amongst multiple users, and I’m pretty certain most people use a single account (not one per user like a business). In our loft Lisa and I share the desktop and Samsung Netbook, so the question is, which account should Mesh run under? Until recently they’ve run under my account but that isn’t useful for Lisa. If she wants to connect to our Home Server, she has to log into www.mesh.com with my account, not very practical. So I created a third Mesh account and we now use that on all shared machines. I thought this would kick the machine out of my Mesh account but to my surprise it didn’t! Not only is the machine accessible using our shared account, I can also connect to it directly from my laptop. To take things one step further, Lisa can log into the Home Server, sign into Mesh with her account, add the machine to her Mesh, then sign the machine back into our shared account. Now our Home Server is available directly from both our laptops, perfect! When it comes to sharing files, we’ve created Mesh folders in our own Meshes for files we want on the Home Server. Then shared this folder with our shared account, thus allowing us to to control access to our stuff. This is particularly useful with the Netbook, which if lost\stolen whilst travelling doesn’t contain anything valuable and can’t access anything sensitive in our Meshes, like our work laptops! Here you can see Fizban (our Home Server) in our shared account and my account at the same time:


(Our Shared Mesh Account)	(My Mesh Account)

Oh and if you’re wondering where the machine names come from. The answer is they are all people or places in the DragonLance books. This all started about 17 years ago when I had to name my first computer. I was reading Dragon’s of Autumn Twilight and used the name Tass. Since then I’ve kept religiously to the theme. Fortunately Osprey (our Netbook) is not only named after the place we got engaged (Osprey Reef) but it’s also the name of a Griffon in a DragonLance book, so the theme continues!