It always happens: When traveling for business, you always forget to send yourself an important file or drag a presentation onto your flash drive at the last minute. The result? Frantic phone calls to a distant office or rummaging through old files to find a replacement.
I have taken to moving almost all of my active files to cloud services and, in some cases, I even duplicate these files between services, ensuring that if one site goes down I still have a few options left. Here are some of my favorite services when it comes to maintaining data while on the road.
Buffalo’s Cloudstor hard drive allows users to access it remotely.
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Pogoplug – Right now I have a Buffalo Cloudstor drive (shown) at home that offers cloud access to every single file, video, and MP3 on the drive. It is, in short, my data dump away from home and uses a sharing service called Pogoplug to allow me to access, view, and share files that I’ve left at home. The drive has become my de facto backup location and is a little over half full with data from my home computer in my attic office.
Most important, however, is that the drive requires no PC access so you can shut down most of your office gear and leave the drive on the network, thereby saving energy.
Dropbox – Dropbox is a file syncing service that allows you to sync a single folder (or folders) between multiple computers. Any time you change something on one machine, those changes are reflected on every other machine connected to your Dropbox account. You can also maintain backups of your current files.
Dropbox has become the home for files that I’m always working on. All of my important, current projects exist there and they are synced in all of my machines. This is also useful for syncing configurations files among all of your computers. For example, I synced a program called QuicKeys’ configurations for all of my machines, thereby ensuring that all of my keyboard macros were the same on every machine. Nerdy, but useful.
Crate – Crate is a simple, useful service that you can use in real times of need. It is dead simple — you drag a file into the service and receive a link to that file. You can then download that file anywhere in the world. It is perfect for larger files that you may not be able to email and the drag-and-drop simplicity ensures that the sender isn’t confused by passwords or folders.