Connecting to my Mac from Far, Far Away

[comrade]

Hi everyone, I'm about to head out traveling for several months to South East Asia and am wondering whether it's feasible and practical to set my Mac up for remote connections while I'm on the road.
While traveling I'm obviously going to be taking a lot of pictures and videos and it would be nice if it were possible to be able to log on to my Mac remotely and transfer files securely and reasonably quickly from computers during my travels. Also I have an ipod and if it stopped working or was stolen it would be nice to be able to buy an ipod and be able to reacquire my music.

My first question is whether this is a sensible solution to my problems and my second is where is a good place to find resources on how to do this.

Another question I have is I know it's possible to carry around USB drives that can carry an OS on it. I'm wondering if this would be a good idea as one could have a personalized OS ready and waiting with relevant apps (such as skype and a program for connecting to my mac) along with some temporary storage for images and videos.

Again, I'm sorely lacking in the technical know how of this so any responses would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for any help.

[silentsim]

http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/mac.html

see "back to my mac"

[FanIn80]

I do it almost daily from my iPhone.

http://www.jaaduvnc.com

Edit: Whoops. Sorry, I should have read your entire post first. You won't be able to use an iPhone app to xfer files...

Anyway, Macs have built-in remote screen-sharing. All you need is a VNC client and you're good to go.

Edit again: On a side note, and to expand on what silentsim said, MobileMe really is a decent investment. For everything you get, $99 a year is chump change.

[photon]

www.logmein.com

I use that cross platform for remote access to my computers. They have a free version.

As for transferring files around, you have to keep in mind that transferring large amounts of data depends on how fast your Internet connection is, both where you are and where your computer is. Most Internet plans come with 1Mbit upload speeds (upload is what would be important if you were transferring files from your computer here to your computer there).

So lets say you have 5GB of music, a pretty low amount for most people. But even that would take 15-20 hours to transfer from your computer to wherever you are.

Transferring pictures and videos is going to have the same problem with the Internet connection wherever you are; I've seen hotels with speeds so slow it could be modem speed.

What you could do is basically make sure that when you are there there are 2 copies of everything.. Take a small netbook with a 160GB HDD and have your music backup on there, and then make copies of your photos and stuff from the memory cards onto it as well.. make sure you have enough memory cards to hold all the pics you want to take, then you'll always have 2 copies, on the memory card and on the netbook.

Then if one gets stolen you still have the other.

Or burn stuff to DVD and send it back to yourself?

[Sliver]

I can vouch for logmein as well - we use it at my business (the paid version). It's around $40/year, is very reliable and customer support is excellent. It's worth checking out the free version if you're at all interested.

[sclitheroe]

Back to My Mac in MobileMe is fantastic when it works - some firewalls will definitely trip it up though. Out of five sites I routinely work from, only 4 work with Back to My Mac properly. If you aren't going to use the other features of MobileMe, its not worth the money though.

(WARNING: iDisk functionality in MobileMe is not robust enough, and will break your heart any time you try and use it - see dropbox below for a recommendation instead)

Log Me In is a great solution, and is one that continually impresses me.

For transferring files around, get the 50 gig paid version of Dropbox. Upload files from any web browser, and feel confident that they will end up on your Mac securely. You could even copy or house your iTunes collection in your Dropbox, and grab files that way via the web interface. Dropbox is particularly good for photos because you can run a photogallery right off their site, so friends and family can look at your photos as you upload them, and they are still being synced back to your Mac as well.

For the cost of MobileMe per year, you could do LogMeIn for a year, and the 50 gig Dropbox for a year, that's what I would recommend.

[photon]

Good call on dropbox, I use that all the time. It'll just be a question of how many pictures and videos he has and how fast the Internet connection will be wherever he is.

[FanIn80]

Dropbox sounds pretty awesome actually.

[Russic]

I use logmein on both my computers and my iPhone (yes I paid $30 for the app). Overpriced app, but it's just so damn easy and is the only option I tried (computer or iPhone) that didn't frustrate me.