Storing files online for easy travel access

Obviously, it can be stressful to tote your computer with you everywhere (what if I can’t find an internet connection? what if my laptop gets stolen? what if I drop it and everything breaks? where did I put that thumb drive with my important documents on it?) and most of us can’t have a dedicated desktop office if we’re constantly moving.  Even if you settle somewhere for a few months, it might be difficult to get an external backup drive, printers, or other things that a home office would require.  Obviously, if you’re living somewhere for years, it’s a bit easier, but you can still take advantage of some of these programs.

Who hasn’t written an important document only to have your computer crash and need to be defragmented…and you’ve lost some valuable files afterwards?  We all forget to back things up as often as we should (or at all! A friend of mine told me that she had NEVER backed up her computer with not only all her personal files on it but all the files for several businesses she was running, without which, the businesses would have been lost!  After hyperventilating, I made her back it all up to an external drive and literally a month and a half later, her computer froze and she lost ALL THE DATA on it, which could be retrieved and restored thanks to the backup drive.  She sent me flowers. ::grin::) 

Mozy is an automatic updating online backup storage, which gives you your own little space on their servers to store whatever you want there.  You install the program on your computer and tell it what you want to back up — it could be everything, or only a few very important folders.  Then, whenever you go online, Mozy checks for changes in the areas you told it to backup and saves the information in your storage space.  You can access all the files at any time, and it works on a yearly fee for unlimited storage (or free for up to 2 GB).

Mozy is hands-down the best deal for internet backup options, but if you just need to store documents in a way that you can access them later (and by documents, I mean .doc, .txt, .xls, or .pdf files, to name the most common formats), it’s hard to go wrong with Google Documents.  You can create documents directly in their interface, or upload them from your computer (or thumb drive), and keep them stored there indefinitely, for free.  They are private — not visible to the Google search engine — although you can choose to share them with other people via email or iGoogle “handle.”

To send large files without uploading them to a remote server (if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that, you need to know about this service), you can use Yousendit. You can send up to 100MB free, and anything larger than that, you must pay a nominal fee for an account.  But the service compresses the file, and makes it available to the recipient via a weblink (which does eventually expire, meaning that not just anyone can read your files).  You can use this to send videos, pictures, or songs, all notoriously large files, without having a dedicated FTP uploader at your disposal.