If I am a suspenders and belt kinda guy, you're just not wearing any pants at all. Anyone who owns a box they refer to as “the abandon ship [p]ack” is probably not a person who spends a lot of time consumed with the thought of risk.

Have you ever considered backup up to a USB thumb drive and mailing it to yourself back home (or a friend who could Fedex back to you when you need it) when you stop somewhere? I know it's not very frequent, but at least you get the data off the boat and it wouldn't cost too much – your really critical data should fit in a 16GB thumb drive I'd suspect.

I understand what you’re trying to do and I’m sure something does it, I just don’t know what it is. There are so many changes to PST files undere the covers, that I would be worry that something didn’t sync up before I shut down and I would be propagating incomplete data to another machine and beyond.

Have you looked at SherWeb? They do Exchange hosting for $8.95/month with a 3GB mailbox. It’s not free, but it’s reasonable. I have used them for over a years and I’m pretty happy with them. Their uptime is great and their speed is reasonable. No one comes close to their price as far as I know. he only downside is they use Barracuda for spam filtering which stinks. They don’t even have contextual filtering, just bayes and blacklists. I am not affiliates with the company FWIW.

The other reason to use Exchange instead of trying to sync PST files is that you can easily coordinate with mobile devices when you use Exchange.

Good luck. If you find anything that does the trick for you, please pass it along.

Maybe I’m wearing shorts.. with a stainless steel cage for underwear. I am consumed with the thought of risk, it’s just easier to plan for because it is so final. There is no maybe someone can recover my lost data.. it’s gone!!

I sync critical data to thumb drive(s) on a daily basis, so my work ALWAYS lives in at least two places. We usually use DVDs to send home because 1GB sticks are NEW where we travel. We just have way too much “critical” data, last time we were home we left a 500 GB drive filled with photos, video, journals etc.. and I think that would be small for the average person.

How many “average people” don’t back up their data anywhere? If they do, are they saving monthly backups off-site? Seems like a pretty HUGE untapped market, especially for solutions that are seamless and unobtrusive; i.e. my Dad could use it .. or better yet, he didn’t even know he was.

I’ll leave you to the topic at hand and sorry for the detour. I just find it all so fascinating.. Maybe I’ll start a new blog called “It’s all new to me” – “Technology reviews and observations from a high tech cast away”. Think anyone would read it? The first post would be “Observations from a Twitter Virgin”.

I don’t know about DropBox, but it’s pretty similar to SyncPlicity. The “block” level syncing may help with syncing PST files, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Depending on how you use Outlook, your PST file may be changing constantly and that may cause problems – even if they’re not major, you may not know if you’re completely in sync at any particular time. However, the differential syncing is a nice feature that SyncPlicity does not yet have.

I think you can pretty easily get donw what you’re looking for with respect to different size drives. I’ll speak to SyncPlicity, although it appears that DropBox does the same thing. Sync *everything* you may be interested in sharing with the SyncPlicity server from your biggest machine. Then, from every other machine, specify which files and directories you want synced with that particular machine. you don’t have to sync all files/directories with every machine. Even if you don’t know what you want at any time, you can sync different files/directories at different times. That said, depending on the amount of data, this could take some real time. It’s be cheaper to get a bigger disk on those small machines

Both SyncPlicity and DropBox have 2GB trial accounts. Download them both and give ‘em a try.

Hope that helps.

If I am a suspenders and belt kinda guy, you’re just not wearing any pants at all. Anyone who owns a box they refer to as “the abandon ship [p]ack” is probably not a person who spends a lot of time consumed with the thought of risk.

Have you ever considered backup up to a USB thumb drive and mailing it to yourself back home (or a friend who could Fedex back to you when you need it) when you stop somewhere? I know it’s not very frequent, but at least you get the data off the boat and it wouldn’t cost too much – your really critical data should fit in a 16GB thumb drive I’d suspect.

I have two questions, I was looking at dropbox and it seems their block level handling of files is the better way to go on frequently modified work files. Would this mean I can park my Outlook .pst file there? Of course this is probably one of the most bass-ackwards way of having e-mail being synced on two or three different machines. One of the other services iDrive implies they can handle that.

Second, how do these folks handle storage discrepencies on different devices? Say I want (what is essentially) a copy of a set of work files in a folder that is 40 GB and I am using a netbook with 8GB space? I am only working with less than 100MB of files at any given time, so I sort of just need an “image” of what is in the “folder in the clouds”.

Ideally, I suppose, what I am looking for is an offsite “network drive”, but I haven’t quite figured out how they resolve “syncing” multiple devices that may not have equal/sufficient storage space. 90% of the time I can probably connect and get a current copy of what I need, work on it and leave the bulk of the other files in the cloud, I just want to have some way of specifying certain files be available off-line ahead of time (like say I am going to be working on Project X while I am watching the kids at the park). I would want all of project X folder to be on my local drive of my netbook, I don’t need Project A thru W on the local netbook drive (which wouldn’t fit anyway). When I return to the house, I would be back on-line and it would sync back up to the cloud.

Does that make sense?

John

Nice writeup. If you are suspender and belts, then what am I? With NO access to the cloud at sea (or in remote ports) I’ve never had the chance to play around with any of it. You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t even backup their computers while sailing, and it plays such a critical role: communication, navigation, and memories (photos, videos, journals etc). It’s NOT like a boat and the salt air environment is the optimal for long-term electronics life. Even if you do have a backup it’s right there with the primary source .. all ready to go down with the ship.

We keep our backup drives in a watertight case in the abandon ship back (as if THAT will help).

FriendFeed Discussion

In terms of backup, I totally agree – restores *are* what’s important. Personally, though, I like synchronization at least as much. Of course, I run multiple machines and have a server, since I “backup” files among these already and transparently (think Windows Home Server which, I wish would move to Server 2008 already, BTW), I already have some diversification and multiple restore locations. Good and transparent sync service (like Live Mesh, as you say) make life with multiple machines WAY easier.

Great summary! Yup, rsync basically covers the bases There are some very good, smart synchronization tools for Windows. I use Beyond Compare, for example. I still need to be able to give it a target it understands, though – a Windows share, a mounted volume or an FTP site. AS you say, thus the services lying on top of the raw providers.