Wouldn't it be good be able to take a computer on the road with you, without lumping a laptop around in your car? You can access your e-mail with a service like Hotmail, but that's not as convenient as having all your personal data to hand, as you do with Outlook or Thunderbird. There is another way, though, that requires little more than a PC and a USB drive or portable hard drive.

MigoSync takes all your most needed info, like e-mails, contacts and documents, copies it to an encrypted area of your portable drive and enables you to get at it from just about any PC, without installing anything on that host machine.

Installation is easy enough; start by running the software and choosing a drive to create the MigoSync Encrypted Zone on. This may be a memory card, USB drive or portable HD. Select an e-mail client of your choice - the Premium version of MigoSync supports Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Lotus Notes - and decide which files you want to take with you. You can take all e-mails or limit them to those recently sent and received, and choose all or selected documents from My Documents.

The software finalises the installation by syncing the two sets of files together; that is, copying them from your home PC to the Encrypted Zone it has created on your portable drive. From then on, you can disconnect your drive and take it with you.

To access your data on a friendly host PC, connect your drive and run the MigoSync software from it. It may take a while to open a large Encrypted Zone, but once you've opened it and selected the profile of your home PC - you can have profiles from several different PCs on your portable drive - the icons on your desktop change and you can access what looks like your home PC. Open Word and it defaults to the My Documents folder on your portable drive, open Outlook and you have access to all your e-mails and contacts.

The one proviso to this, and it could be quite a major one, is that the host PC you run MigoSync on must have the same e-mail client as your home PC. If you synced with a PC using Outlook, you won't be able to use Outlook Express or Thunderbird on a host machine to handle your e-mail.

When you've finished working on the host PC, exit MigoSync and everything returns to the state it was in before (though desktop icons may be in a different order), so there's little evidence you were ever there. On your return home, sync the portable drive with your home PC through MigoSync and both sets of data are back up-to-date.

Verdict
MigoSync is a really clever idea and Migo software is charging a reasonable price for it. Assuming you have access to a PC with the right applications on it, you can work with your own e-mail information in a secure and readily synchronised environment, stored on a portable drive. It takes all the fiddliness out of having to work with Webmail and leaves any host PC unchanged.

Company: Migo Software

Tags: outlook express hotmail email client usb flash drive personal computer microsoft outlook mail microsoft