A Glitch in My Digitally Nomadic Life

A few weeks ago I wrote about the concept of the digital nomad and how I was actively trying to make changes that enable my life to be completely portable. From the scanning of mail to moving my data to the cloud. Then last week my whole process hit a kink. I purchased a MacBook Pro and I became completely reliant on the cloud. Let me explain what happened.

Prior to purchasing my new computer I had been running a Dell Inspiron laptop to handle most of my computing activities. While I also had a G5 Mac, all of my business activities were done on my laptop. Early in July I decided to start moving all of my data to Amazon’s S3 servers with the help of Jungle Disk. The concept was that I could move all my data to the cloud and then no matter what computer I was using I could simply log-on, sync my computer with the cloud’s version and I’d be good to go.

Unfortunately it didn’t work that easily. The most significant problem was that my Mac and PC have different file and folder naming conventions. For instance on my PC my documents are stored under: /NICKLAPTOP/C/Documents and Settings/Nick/My Documents. If you are a PC user than this will look familiar. On my Mac however, my documents are stored under /Macintosh HD/Users/nick/Documents/.

While similar in many ways, this slightly different naming convention has made it impossible for me to sync my two computers. This means that Jungle Disk has simply become an external hard drive, just like all the others laying around my house. These external hard drives are more of a hastle than helpful because my data is not in sync. If I download a file off of Jungle Disk that was uploaded by my PC and modify it, there is no way to sync it other than manually overwriting the file.

Honestly, I can’t believe Jungle Disk doesn’t have a simple mapping feature. If there was a way to say that /NICKLAPTOP/C/Documents and Settings/Nick/My Documents on my PC equals /Macintosh HD/Users/nick/Documents/ on my Mac, I’d be good to go. As far as I can tell this isn’t yet available. My attempt at becoming a digital nomad has been rendered useless simply by switching computers, not by moving across the country.

If you know a solution to this problem please let me know! I don’t want Jungle Disk as a backup hard drive, I want it to be my central repository of information. Have you run into similar problems? Do you think becoming completely portable is a ridiculous notion?

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