Keeping your files up to date while on the move

I was taking to a local business who needed files while on the road but didn't want the hassle of moving files from his laptop to his desktop all the time just to keep them up to date and this got me thinking of solutions. Here are a few I have tried, I know there are more out there and if you use any or know of any then please add them.

First one I am going to talk about is Gladinet cloud desktop.

This allows you add a virtual hard drive to your computer where you can drag and drop your file like a normal drive but all your files are then moved into the cloud. This means you can access your files from different computers anywhere. Gladinet supports connections to many popular online storage systems including, Google docs, Picassa, Amazon S3, FTP and skydrive from Microsoft.

I have set up Gladinet with my skydrive account and this gives me a virtual drive of 25Gb. I have used this to backup my photo's of my family. As I was moving a lot of files I got the option to schedule my upload to a time that would not affect me, so I got it to start at midnight. If you have used skydrive you will know it is a pain as you cannot drag and drop folders onto it. At the moment there are 2 versions of Gladinet, the first is free but is limited to 1000 tasks/sub-tasks, the second one costs $60 and this limit is removed. They are working on a third level that has more integration.

The only disadvantage is that you need a internet connection to access your files. while this might work well with some people, it could be a problem for others.

My other suggestion is Dropbox solves this problem as it has an offline cached mode. As I only use Windows most of my suggestions are biased towards this but Dropbox is a universal program. You can get it for Windows, Linux, Macs and even a free app for your Iphone. This makes it easy to move files or share files between different formats and if this was not enough then you can also access your files using a browser.

Dropbox creates a folder in your My Documents folder, in windows, and it acts like a normal folder but it does take it's time to upload your files. Unlike Gladinet it does not offer a scheduled upload but instead does it straight away. Like I said Dropbox has an offline mode so as long as it has synced after you added files then you can use and save to your files on your other computer, when it does get a connection it does not upload all your files only the data that has changed so once you have it up it is quicker and uses less internet bandwidth. Unlike Gladinet who uses other online storage Dropbox uses theirs, as a result you only get 2Gb free but you can upgrade your storage to 50Gb or 100Gb at a cost but see website for details. Again this can be used as a method of backing up files that you need or want to share.

Please read their terms and conditions before you use them.

If you know anymore then please add them