Storage has come a long way from the good old days of keeping data on floppy discs and DVD’s. Its advanced to external hard drives and storage media such as iPods and SD Cards and so on. These forms of data storage are very common nowadays.

All these are good methods to carry information with you as you go however they have a few disadvantages. They are physical devices prone to accidents and subject to demands of physical transportation. They can be lost or stolen and can end up placing information into unauthorized hands. They may also require special drivers or slots installed on the machines before the information can be seen. Collaboration and versioning can be difficult unless if additional transportation methods are implemented.

• The alternative to carrying physical storage devices with you is to store the information in a secure online facilities. Depending on the online facility, this can have the following advantages:
• Its accessible everywhere as long as you have access to the internet.
• It is safe and secure (provided the online facility has good authentication and authorization practice).
• It may be possible to edit your documents online directly on the online facility’s site. Alternatively, some facilities offer offline editing with automatic synchronization back to the online document.
• It is possible to share documents with selected or public audience.
• Some online facilities provide for collaborative editing of document.
• Lastly, its possible to keep physical stores synchronized across multiple devices

Here are a few applications and services that can provide for online document storage, collaboration and remote synchronization:

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As part of a series of how to articles for GBridge, lets look at how to share files across your sessions. There are many ways to keep files stored in a central server (such as Google Docs) to access whenever you wish to, however, this method is slightly different. For newbies like me, its an easy way to get access to your documents stored on one of your computers from another. For example, if you have some nice mp3’s stored at home, instead of putting them onto a USB drive and bringing them into work, you can share your mp3 folder on your home machine and listen to them on the fly at work :)

The types of files that can be accessible is varied and includes popular media files such as mp3, flash video, images and even provides functionality to show the images as a slideshow :) The cool thing about this method of sharing is that because the files are not stored in a central server, you are accessing them directly from your shared PC. This means that your documents/files never stored on machines unless you authorize them :)

Right, so lets begin by creating a simple share that can be accessed from your “work” machine.

Assumptions

1. You have already set up two connections (follow my earlier guide if you need a refresher).
2. You have a folder on your home pc which contains the files you wish to access from work.

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There are many reasons to connect to your home pc while you are at work. And there are many methods. As a lot of people have Windows Vista or XP at home, methods such are Remote Desktop Connections may work well, but can require fiddling with firewalls, and configuration knowledge that most of us technology newbies may not know much about.

Connecting via RDP (Remote Desktop) also “takes over” the PC at home so its not suitable for desktop sharing (ie, there is someone at home looking at what you are doing). The PC is effectively “locked out” while you are connected remotely to it. This is frequently the case when my wife needs a little help in doing something and I just can’t talk her through on the phone.

This is also valuable when “assisting” people such as parents or grandparents. Have you tried talking your grandparents through setting up their email application at home? If you have, then you may understand the pain heh.

So what is GBridge? Its an application that sits on both your work pc and home pc and allows you to remotely control one or the other. It has many other uses such as file sharing etc, but the purpose of this article is to detail out how to get the remote desktop sharing working. You can go here for additional information about its functions if you are interested.

Anyway, lets begin.

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