Mobile data, Mobile Me

In an earlier posts, I noted that individuals crossing the border into and out of the US may risk compromising their data. As with many professionals who’ve been using their laptop as a desktop replacement, the prospect of losing my laptop for any period of time has me thinking long and hard about how I work.

Many large law firms (or companies) store almost all of their data, particularly e-mail, centrally, with their laptop or desktop increasingly becoming a very sophisticated dumb terminal. Those of us who don’t work at larger companies can’t really do that, but increasingly services such as MobileMe from Apple or Backpack let us store and sync our data centrally, which at least ensures that we can access our data even without our laptops. For example, although I would still lose access to a lot of other data if the government (or a thief) decided to take my laptop away, the combination of MobileMe and IMAP e-mail on my work account means that I’d have access to the bulk of what I needed, and backups (in my case, via TimeMachine) would ensure that my personal data is preserved as well.

As you can tell, I’m an Apple user, and a longtime user of .Mac (now MobileMe), which has proved an excellent way to keep my working files, calendars, mail, and pretty much everything else backed up and synchronized across multiple computers. Although Mobile Me is now available for Windows, the word is it’s been a difficult transition.

If you’re using something else, particularly something which works well with Windows, tell us about it!