Portable Storage for a Portable Family

These days, our entire lives are on the computer. We've got digital photos, digital videos, digital music, e-mail, blogs, documents, financial records, calendars... You name it, it's on the computer. And if you are living a portable lifestyle, you've probably long since abandoned the desktop PC in favor of a laptop. But laptops are not an ideal repository for all of those precious digital keepsakes and archives. Your laptop is constantly at risk of being stolen or damaged, and unless you've got an excellent backup policy, your data is at risk as well. Although I highly recommend doing so, even storing important archives to an external disk drive or DVD doesn't solve all of your problems. They fill up, get lost, get damaged, and tend to become a hassle to lug around with you wherever you go.

A new service called Tubes may help to make your most important files more accessible to you and your contacts. According to the website, Tubes gives you 2GB of online storage space, to be divided up into "tubes" of related content. You can invite your contacts to create Tubes accounts and access your tubes, and you in turn can access tubes created by others. Using the Tubes desktop client (currently available for XP and Vista, and with a OS X and Web client in the works), you can easily add important files to your online repository, by dragging and dropping them onto a tube. They'll instantly be shared with anyone else who can see the tube, and it's always kept in sync, allowing you and your contacts to work collaboratively on any file. In addition to sharing files, you can apparently also share bookmarks, songs, and photos. I think it'd be nice if there was some sort of blogging, or chat functionality, but perhaps the creators decided it was better not to reinvent the wheel. It's also not clear from the website how you work with your files once they're in your repository, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a straightforward process. Everything else about the client looks pretty self explanatory.

Unfortunately, since I'm a Linux user, I can't test this out for myself, but I'd like to know what you think of Tubes. Is it worth it? Is there something better out there? I'd like to hear about it!