3 steps to store and access anything anywhere

Have you gone to a high profile presentation only to discover that your latest version is in your home computer or office desktop?Have you ever wished that you didn’t have to carry your laptop anywhere?

Have you ever wanted to travel totally light, say carrying a pendrive and you lost the device? Have you felt the need for your presentation software in a conference or in a client location?

If your answer is yes to any one of the questions above, you will be able to relate to my experiences.

My selection criteria was simple: portable, light (physically) and I shouldn’t be bothered with backing up or maintaining. And of course, investments should be, well, zero. I don’t prefer to carry music or videos with me, anyway.

Required: USB pendrive of atleast 2GB capacity

One primary computer - desktop or laptop

1 Signup on Dropbox for free 2GB space (Note- You can also add more space by doing certain steps as described in Dropbox)

or
If you want more free space (5GB), sugarsync is a good alternative.

2 Download Portable apps platform with any applications from portableapps.com on your pendrive

1. LibreOffice for Office apps
2. Chrome browser for browsing
3. DSynchronize for synchronizing Pendrive and Dropbox/Sugarsync (with realtime sync)
4. VUE for intuitive presentations (I copied the ProgramFilesVUE files and is now portable)
5. Lyx for WYSIWYG LaTeX editing
6. Zotero Standalone for storing research citations (works well with Chrome’s Zotero plug-in)
7. Skype (just in case, there is no skype on a machine I login) 3 Install dropbox app (or sugarsync desktop app) on your computer and designate a folder inside the Dropbox folder as Pendrive.

Now, there are apps in portable apps to secure all files, folders and settings using a password. As luck would have it, I was invited to give a talk and I wanted to give a presentation using VUE and not powerpoint. I popped in my USB pendrive into the presentation machine, opened VUE from there and in less than a minute, I was ready to present without any hitches.

The other day, I forgot to take my USB pendrive to a workshop, I was facilitating. No problem, I had sugarsync on my mobile device to retrieve all required files and apps. Oh yes, one could avoid the USB drive altogether with an app running on a mobile device, but that is a choice I leave it to you.

Happy wireless and careless life :-)

Later, I will write about Skydrive, GMailDrive