A lot of online business owners know the importance of being able to use any internet location to run their business. I have one personal favorite that I use frequently for document and file storage.
I recommend checking out http://www.google.com/docs if you don’t use it yet.
I store documents on their servers that I frequently need. They currently allow 1 gig of space using a free Google account. Thumb drives are a good alternative, but they can easily get lost, stolen, and some are easily damaged. In fact, a family member recently called me telling me all about his USB drive story. It fell out of his car and he was lucky he hadn’t run it over!
I’ve had my fun with USB drives. I’ve even tried mirroring my data to other drives. I find cloud computing a better alternative.
There is another benefit though. The other day I needed to share a video with a business partner. I uploaded the file which was over 100 megs and I was able to share it with him, giving only him access to that document. Because Google’s servers are incredibly fast, I was able to upload the file in less than an hour and he was able to download the file within a small window of time.
This is what cloud computing is all about. There are even some applications that will allow you sync a desktop folder with Google Docs. I know Amazon has services that are similar. The benefit is that Google Docs is free up to one gig. If you’re only storing text documents, then you shouldn’t have a problem running out of storage space.
I highly recommend you give it a try!