Recently I discovered a interesting app that lets you use your gmail account as a drive.

This is a quite slow but handy and has all kinds of possible uses.  In terms of backing up files, if you are a mobile laptop user and are working on the move, in an internet cafe or at a client’s premisis, copying files onto DVDR or a USB memory stick isnt quite a good idea if the laptop then gets stolen with items of media with sensitive information in the carry case.  One example of this is a friend of mine who went on holiday to New Zealand and did web design on a laptop whilst on the move.

The gmail drive works by sending the file as an attachment to your own gmail address, Gmail have now upped the storage space from 2.7Gb to 4.3Gb.

Now Im not sure what the limit of individual files that can be sent as attachments as google, but I think a zip application like WinRAR or 7zip could chop up a large file into small pieces.

Imagine that, you could compress a large amount of files you want to back up into one file as a zip or rar file, then cut the file into smaller chunks (where necessary) then send to your gmail account whilst you are in hotel room on a wireless connection, whilst probably quite slow, this method could maybe used as a handy disaster recovery set up for a small bunch of traveling salesman or engineers who travel quite a lot.   If a problem occurs the user could recover the files themselves or the IT support person could put them onto a DVDR and post it out to the user’s location.