How to Access Online Data While Flying

What is cloud computing? We go through this terminology many times during our everyday internet connected work these days. In fact, this is a way to save your important and essential documents on the internet instead of your PC or Mac. A computer can be broken into by malicious code, or one’s data can get accidentally deleted without having a backup prepared. In such conditions, it is a good way to keep one’s data protected at the internet, so that one can access it from a university computer or an internet café. Some examples are Google Docs, Apple’s MobileMe and Microsoft’s Live Mesh.

They say that everything has its positive and negative aspects. Same is the case with cloud computing. Though this is a wonderful way to save one’s documents without the fear of a virus corrupting them, there are some drawbacks attached to it. Unfortunately, your documents saved at the internet will leave you as soon as the internet connectivity is gone; whenever you are flying, or are at a place with no wireless broadband connectivity. Though airlines are planning to make Wi-Fi service available on-board, it will certainly take a lot of time.

How to triumph over this critical issue? Following are certain methods which can be adopted to over-come this drawback of cloud computing.

Gears:

You can download this program from gears.google.com for free. This program works with Google Docs and few similar programs like Zoho. Google Docs provide the users with spreadsheets and word processing programs for storing the documents online. Gears allows the users to download their documents stored at Google Docs to their computers. Once the documents are downloaded, they can be worked upon, edited and altered even when the user is offline. These modified documents will be uploaded to Google Docs when the user logs in again. This way, one can work with their online documents while being on a plane, or being at a place where there is no internet connectivity.

There are certain limitations to Gears. One of those is that it does not allow the user to create new documents and limits to modifying the existing ones. Also, there isn’t any trouble-free way provided to upload multimedia files.

MobileMe:

This service is provided by Apple, with a yearly subscription fee of $99.00. It is an all-purpose file sync service, which works with Windows computers, Mac, iPhone and iPod touch. The user is allowed to upload any kind of files up to 20 GB, and those files can be downloaded to computers, iPhone and iPod. Also, it can sync the address books, calendars and emails.

Live Mesh:

This is a free service provided by Microsoft. It is still in its beta stage. It uses quite a simple method to work with both Windows and Mac. After the software is installed on the computer, an icon of “shared folder” will appear on the desktop. Up to 5 GB of data can be put into this folder, and all the files will be uploaded once connected to the internet.

When this software is installed on any other device like a laptop; it will become a part of one’s personal Data Mesh and the data will be synced between all the shared devices. That data can be altered and modified at any device which is part of the system, and all devices which are linked to each other via Live Mesh will show the modified data. It doesn’t sync emails, address books and calendars.

Final Words:

These were some clever ways to keep you working while on a plane, without the need of getting connected to internet for the sole purpose of accessing your cloud data. By using these means, one can always get connected to one’s work, and an interrupted period will never have to be encountered, provided one’s laptop has a fine battery life.

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Tags: google docs, internet, iphone, iPod touch, Mac, mobileme, online documents, software