Tools for a connected, distributed, and backed up existence

If you're like me, you've got data all spread out across the place on different machines (PC and Mac), smartphones and in the cloud. And you probably spend a lot of time trying to synchronise data, emails, contacts, appointments, bookmarks, browser state, RSS subs, documents, and everything else across all these devices, and invariably, when you actually need something important it's somewhere else. And of course, keeping all this stuff backed up is a nightmare - either it doesn't get backed up, or you end up with multiple copies of everything in several different places, with no sense of which is the canonical version. So, here's a list of the tools I find pretty essential to get over some of these problems.

• Gmail - sort of obvious, like.
• Foldershare - Groove's younger, more lightweight, and generally easier to use cousin. I've just realised that it has an OS X client as well, which means that you can transparently synchronise your files across your various PCs and Macs, and never lose those important documents again.
• Jungledisk - backup to Amazon's S3.
• Nokia N73 on 3's XSeries. Flat rate web access, and a pretty decent browser.
• OS X iSync - keeps contacts and events on your phone and mobile synced up. You'll need to do a little work to get your N73 hooked up - check here for a nice blog post, and here for the plugin.
• Lifeblog - syncing up pictures and SMS's between phone and PC.

So, basic strategy is to use Foldershare to keep your important bits sychronised and distributed across all your computers. Use Jungledisk on one computer to back everything up to S3. If there's stuff you don't want to distribute across all your computers just run Jungledisk and back up those particular bits to a separate bucket. Starting out, there will be an inevitable big hit as everything synchronises and gets backed up - but after that you can just let it all transparently tick over in the background, in the knowledge that as long as you ensure that you save everything into your synchronised folders, it will be safe and secure - that's gotta be good :) [tags]mobile, synchronise, synchronize, foldershare, jungledisk, backup, onlinebackup, n73, isync, lifeblog[/tags]