Recently I was looking for a free backup tool that would keep my important documents online and in case any problems with my laptop, I could easily recover them.

I could use my own hosting space, but I thought it wasn’t convenient to manually upload the documents I was constantly working on. So, I decided to look for some automatic solution. Basically, I need the following things:

• Ability to save the data online
• Ability to perform automatic synchronization, i.e. when I change a file on my local computer it should get automatically updated on the remote storage and vice versa.

Thus, such things as the built-in Windows utilities that required you save your data on external devices or network drivers wasn’t the thing I was looking for. Moreover, various online services like SkyDrive was still not the best choice, because they just provided an online storage, but didn’t give any mechanism of automatic file synchronization. I also had a look at Live Sync this service was very close to the thing I was looking for, but unfortunately it could only synchronize data only between connected devices, but it didn’t have any online storage. Anyway, I was given an advice to try Live Mesh.

At a first glance Live Mesh is nearly identical to Live Sync, however it has one, but significant difference – it does provide an online storage of 5 GBs which was pretty enough for me.

So, what do you need to do to start backing up important data with Live Mesh? First of all, you need to sign up with it. After that you’ll get an access to Live Desktop where you can create folders and upload files manually. Sure, manual file uploading isn’t the best thing to do and you can download an utility which reside in the system tray and will monitor all the changes of the files you set to synchronize. However, it’s not very clear how one can download the necessary software, in fact, you should select “Add Device" from the main menu.

After installing the software, you can just select the folder which contents you want to backup in Windows Explorer.

And every file you create or edit will be automatically added to your online storage.

Generally, I’m very happy with Live Mesh and would definitely recommend to give it a try. Also, don’t forget that it’s presently in the beta phase, so many features are to come, for example, software for mobile devices, while now you can install it on Windows and Mac.