[Musicman]

This isn’t a trucker targeted service, but it should be. Jungle Disk (jungledisk.com) is a program that not only offers an online backup service for your computer data (like Carbonite, whose ads you may have heard on the radio), but it also allows you to your online space like a network drive that an unlimited number of computers may use to save and retrieve files. You can create sync folders for each computer you have and every time the save date for a file in that folder changes on your computer, it automatically saves to your online network drive. Most other online backup services make you pay a full fee for each computer you have and there is no option of using your account as a network drive. What’s even more appealing to me is that YOU are in control of your data. You have two choices of where your data is saved (I chose Amazon.com because they seem pretty stable, financially), and you have your own separate account with the hosting site. That way if Jungle Disk ever goes out of business, you will not lose your data. Just log on to Amazon directly and retrieve your data.

For those unfamiliar with how this all works, I’ll give a real world example:

First thing I did when I signed up for this service was to upload all of my pictures and most of my music and many of my programs in a scheduled backup. Next I set up a couple of sync folders for my note book computer and my desktop system. Now every time I open and work with one of the spreadsheets that are essential to my business, that file is automatically saved to the online storage space (or network drive) as soon as I close the file. If I’m on the road and I need or want a file that is on my home computer, all I have to do is browse through the network drive using my notebook and then open the file. If I go to a friend’s house and want to show them some pictures I took, all I have to do is log onto Jungle Disk and open the files. Conversely, if my buddy has some files I want, I can just upload them from his computer. If my computer ever fails, or if I replace it, all I have to do is restore all the files from the online backup.
I know external hard drives are an option for backing up your files as well, but they fail occasionally. I have a 400 GB, 250GB and a 1 TB external hard drive and I still worried that one day one of them would fail at the worst possible time (like when I hadn’t made a second backup of a lot of data). Now I never worry about losing my data. My house can burn down with all my computers in it and I will not have lost one important file.