Traveling with Data

How do you guys store your personal data, pictures, projects you're working on; and how do you travel with it when you go away for a few days or a weekend?

Right now I keep general files, music, movies, pdf reference books etc, on my home server. I keep photos on my desktop computer. The server gets backed up to drive A. The desktop gets backed up to Drive B.

When I travel I sometimes copy data from the desktop to my laptop or usb memory sticks to work on and when I come back I copy the data back to the desktop. This is less than idea. I used to sync a USB stick with certain folders on the desktop but there was a point where things got out of sync and I no longer do that.

The laptop I have is new so I don't really store any data on here. I'm considering using windows offline folders for the files that I need constant access to and moving everything to the home server. Then when I leave the folder structure is maintained and I will have all my files with me.

I'm not sure of the best way to do this yet and I'm looking for input.
I'm especially interested in this because I recently got a photo management software that requires the photos to be in a managed folder structure. When i'm on the go and tagging photos I want to be able to go home and just have everything sync back to the server. The photo software embeds data in the picture metadata so it's important that the files get uploaded back to the server so the metadata is kept.

most of what you're troubled with was solved for me when i paid for dropbox.

for larger files, i travel with a pair of 256GB crucial SSD's in 2.5" external enclosures, that have a bay in both of my desktops at work/home (that are connected to the motherboard with SATA or with usb while i'm on the road with my macbook pro.

What about non third-party server systems.
I'm not keen on paying for multi gigs of data storage nor do I like the idea of storing a lot of my personal data on systems I don't own if I don't have to.

Have you considered using something like Drop Box or Box. Your pictures/important documents can be accessed at any point from any device. They both offer a free 2GB account that you can try and determine if they meet your needs.

One of the issues with a dropbox style system is when it comes to syncing the photo gallery software. It maintains links to the photos folders. I would have to put 40 gigs worth of my picture library in the dropbox folder which becomes expensive. The other option is to only put the few that I am working on at any given time which means I have to rebuild those links when I move those back to my server and grab the next set to work on.

I do backups to hard drives in external cases.

When traveling I simply take one of the hard drives in its external case with me.

The DOS "Subst" command makes the backup look the the original data.

We only have a few files we change on vacation - brokerage account spreadsheet, bank account spreadsheet, business QuickBooks. It is esay enough to copy them back to the source when we get home.

From time to time clients will call us and we can access their data in our programs - QuickBooks and tax software.

Wang191 said:

One of the issues with a dropbox style system is when it comes to syncing the photo gallery software. It maintains links to the photos folders. I would have to put 40 gigs worth of my picture library in the dropbox folder which becomes expensive. The other option is to only put the few that I am working on at any given time which means I have to rebuild those links when I move those back to my server and grab the next set to work on.

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If you learn to keep your temp data folders in dropbox, too, with symlinks, it works great.

I don't use any system that automatically syncs, but I would highly recommend encrypting your laptop/thumbdrives/external hard drives when traveling. I personally use truecrypt on all of my drives.

hotcrandel said:

If you learn to keep your temp data folders in dropbox, too, with symlinks, it works great.

Click to expand...

That's an interesting proposition.

@-Sn1PeR- yup. I utilize Whole disk encryption on my laptop and either encrypted containers or encrypted disks depending on the application.