Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

We have a couple of articles here and here on Life on the Road stressing the importance backing up your data. Especially a laptop in a truck. Hard drives and monitors take a beating from all the vibration in the truck. Use your documents online and have Google backup your data for you! A WIFI or Broadband connection is needed.

Google Plans Service to Store Users’ Data
By KEVIN J. DELANEY and VAUHINI VARA
November 27, 2007; Page B1
Google Inc. wants to offer consumers a new way to store their files on its hard drives, in a strategy that could accelerate a shift to Web-based computing and intensify the Internet company’s competition with Microsoft Corp.

Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives — such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

Google Docs

Separate from this service and it’s available right now is Google Docs (check out the video). If you have spreadsheets or documents, it’s an excellent way to store them and if your using Open Source Office there’s a plug-in to synchronize your documents between your PC and Google Docs. Work on your document / spreadsheet offline, store it or back it up online when you get connected. Google Docs allows you to import your existing documents as well. You can also share your Google documents with specific users, set view or edit options for anyone. The video is more about collaboration but it’s great for individual users too.

Of course, (nothing original ever comes out of Redmond) Microsoft is coming out with their version of online documents called Microsoft Office Live , they’re taking preregistration now, but why wait?

If all you need is storage Amazon has a no frills Simple Storage Service called S3. It costs a little, but you only pay for what you use.

Use multiple computers?

If you use multiple computers like your laptop in the truck and a desktop at home it’s an excellent way to keep things synchronized without moving things around on USB drives all the time. Plus if someone is at home they can either update or view those same documents as well.

We’ve got your documents and spreadsheets (they also have presentations, but when was the last time you saw a trucker use Power Point?) what about your browser? If you’re using Firefox (if not, you really should consider switching!) Google has a plugin for Firefox called Browser Sync

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

Favorites

I’m sure IE has something like it somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. If you’re still not convinced to switch to Firefox and want to sync your bookmarks between computers, consider keeping them online also. Google Bookmarks is excellent for any browser but has a Firefox extension available, also del.icio.us is a great service to not only keep your favorite websites organized but to share what you found. There are dozens of websites to share what you’ve found on the web. Digg.com is very popular but in my opinion Digg has too many steps involved to save a website.

Share This!

See that green Share This button at the bottom of each post? Click on it and check out the websites listed to pick what works for you. Set up an account, place a button on your toolbar, bookmark and tag web pages in seconds. You can then search or browse your favorites from any computer connected to the web.