My Mobile Lifestyle

11/14/2008

Despite appearances, the lifestyle of a productive academic is quite hectic. And, given the flexibility we enjoy, we end of conducting work in many places: office, home, classrooms, labs, and frequently from other cities states, and countries. As a result, I need to access data from all over and keeping track of all that and keeping it synced so that I don’t have multiple versions of it everywhere has been a real chore. Nonetheless, the amount of communal data that I need to reference from different locations is rather limited: email, calendar, contacts, course materials, and select important documents. So, it seems that I should be able to solve this conundrum.

For years I’ve been using the .Mac service and its performed admirably. But they recently renamed it MobileMe (really - how’d that one get through) and changed the domain to me.com which sent us down a path of problems regarding email spam and phishing schemes. But, even though the implementation sucked and they gave me three free months of service to make up for it, I started wondering “why am I even paying for this at all?” I’d also lost some of my contact to file corruption through the service, so I’ve started looking elsewhere.

Of course, I’ve got Gmail for email and I like their calendar solution also (which integrates well with iCal via iPhone synch). BTW, there’s a recent article here that provides some nice detail on alternatives to MobileMe (I really just can’t get over how bad that name is).

So, what I really need to resole is how to store files and make sure everything is synched. I think the synching is going to be the problematic issue - we’ll see. Anyway, I’ve been testing Mozy and Box.net and I like both services, but I don’t know that anything is going to get me the comprehensive solution that I’d like. In the end, I’d like a version of .Mac that works, and that is considerably cheaper.