I know I have chatted to some of you personally about how I adopted Mesh to keep consistency between the desktops of multiple machines, and a question I keep getting asked is how can I tell if data is coming from the local network or from the Internet, potentially costing you precious download traffic. For those of you unaware, in some parts of the world, Internet connectivity can be quite expensive, especially when synchronising over mobile networks, and can also take a big chunk out of your monthly ISP data allowance. Free WiFi in Australia isn't as generous as some of the overseas offerings, so we have to get creative sometimes and actually budget our usage. Trust me, it's not that much fun to get shaped towards the end of the month, or to get hit with the appropriately named excess usage fees.

The easiest way to monitor where Live Sync is downloading or sending to in a nice user friendly way is to start Resource Monitor, just type it in the search area, or launch it from the Performance tab of Task Manager, which is how I usually end up there.

Within Resource Monitor go to the networking tab, and select the MOE.EXE listing.

As you can see, it's easy to determine whether the traffic is local or from the Internet, based on the PC name. Generally the speed of the synchronisation will be a giveaway, but don't rely on this.

Even though Live Sync data can be accessed via SkyDrive, you can only synchronise 5GB (bumped up from 2GB, and back to where Mesh was) via this method, but you can expand beyond the 5GB by doing peer to peer synching without having to synchronise to SkyDrive as well.

My final tips for now - if you have to synchronise a machine without any local peers, you can copy the folder over manually from another drive/source, and then it will just synchronise anything that's different. Remember that you also need to select or create the folder, don't just choose desktop for example, otherwise the files will get synchronised, rather than placing the folder on the desktop and then synchronising.

For more information take a look at the Windows Live Synch Help Center, and this post from the Windows Live Team - thankfully I just found this one - it had the updated naming and storage details included!