Are You A Digital Nomad?

What is a “digital nomad”? I would define a digital nomad as a person that has no permanent office (or has multiple offices) and continues working through the use of a digital companion (laptop, netbook, blackberry, iPhone, etc). While being a digital nomad can be fun and exciting, it does have its costs. Here are just a few of the complications of being a digital nomad:

• Forgetting to Sync Your Files Have you ever been away from your home or office and suddenly remembered a file you needed? Have you ever emailed a file to yourself and then walked out the door, only to later realize the send didn’t go through?
• Disorganized Team Collaboration Does your working team e-mail file revision after file revision to the whole group, to the point where everyone loses track of which is the latest revision?
• Wireless Access Points How do you get a file when you can’t find a wireless access point, but you can find a library with wired access?
• Losing Your Digital Device What would happen if you were outside the country and your laptop or smartphone was stolen, damaged or misplaced? How do you safely carry a backup device?

Introducing NOMADESK

Nomadesk is the “easiest and most secure way to share, synchronize and backup files wherever you are, online or offline”. Here at My Tech Team, we were recently given the opportunity to test this new service, and we are excited to share our results with our customers. Here is what we have found:

Ease of Use

With Nomadesk there was no new software to learn. The Nomadesk fileserver just loaded on our desktop the way any device or USB drive would, and we could easily drag our files over to the server for them to be backed up.

Sharing/Collaboration

Nomadesk provides an easy-to-use and secure solution for business and home users to share files inside and outside the company. You can share access to your virtual fileserver with team members and collaborators, allow read-only access to members outside your team and use two unique features called FileLink and FolderLink to send anyone who you do not give access to your fileserver a link to a file or folder via e-mail. You can even control how long the file remains downloadable.

We tested Nomadesk for sharing and collaboration extensively and were overall pleased with the results. However, there were a few quarrels we had with it which mainly related to using it to share Microsoft Access databases. My Tech Team uses many database driven applications made in Microsoft Access. We were able to share it with all employees locally and abroad by simply moving it to the drive assigned to our virtual fileserver and giving everyone access to the file server by sending them a guest invite, like this:

When our users tried opening the database in multiple locations to add new records, we could not get the database to synchronize with everyone else who had it open. In order to see the changes, the users had to close and re-open the database, which caused some confusion. The second issue was that we could not upload two databases and keep the linking structure. There is a workaround to this one, however — if you use a contacts Access database that is linked to a task management Access database, you would have to re-link them according to their new location and makes sure that EVERYONE’s drive letter is the same. These complications are probably for more advanced users, but we thought it was worth mentioning.

Overall, however, we enjoyed having everyone collaborate on a task and loading it to the same drive. There was no sending emails back and forth, or using a hosted web server as a medium for transferring large files. We would highly recommend it for individual and small team collaboration, but for a large team you may want a service that offers more protection in terms of version control and multi-user simultaneous access.

Synchronization

Having files scattered across multiple computers makes them difficult to keep track of and easy to lose. Nomadesk eliminates that risk by providing a fileserver to securely consolidate your valuable documents, back them up, and synchronize them across multiple computers. With Automatic Sync, we didn’t have to worry about making sure our files were synchronized. We liked the dashboard to check the status of the sync, and that the taskbar icon changed color to indicate whether the fileserver was connected, synchronized or having a conflict.

File synchronization was very speedy because Nomadesk employs what is called DeltaSync technology to speed up the synchronization processes by only updating the portions of the file that have changed.

Unlimited Backup

During the sync process, the files are saved to the “virtual cloud server” and then made available for collaboration. This is like instant disaster recovery — if any of our computers crashed or were stolen, simply reinstalling Nomadesk on to a new system would get us access to all of our files again. While other online backup providers limit the amount of data you can back up and charge more for extra storage, Nomadesk offers you unlimited storage. The unlimited backup is subject to their Fair Usage Policy, but we found that policy to be very reasonable and straight forward.

Security

Nomadesk will only allow others access to your file if you authorize file sharing. They use 256-bit encryption technology to safely transmit and store your files on a secure server that can only be accessed through your registered Nomadesk dashboard. You can view their Security Statement for more information.

Our favorite feature under security is TheftGuard. In the event your computer is stolen you can remotely “shred” the files on the lost computer as soon as someone tries to access them. TheftGuard even allows you to locate your lost device on Google Maps!

There are some problems with filesharing and security, however, depending on how you use the system. Say you have created a virtual team and people are collaborating and working well together, but then Joe Troublemaker decides he is mad and wants to copy all the files to his local hard drive and hold them for ransom. In this scenario, the shred feature would not work.

Another potential security issue with filesharing is the filesharing permissions. Nomadesk sets permissions per drive, not per file or folder. In this way, giving someone access means that they have access to everything. We spoke with April Collins, a virtual assistant, and she brought up a good point. She said that it would not be good for her because she has over 300 clients, and she would not want to give one client access to another client’s files. To prevent this, she would have to create 300 drives and share each individually. Our opinion is that Nomadesk should develop a more advanced rights management feature and enable its customers to create team collaboration based on the folders. If you don’t have 300 clients that you need to collaborate with on an ongoing invidual bases, however, this security issue is not as much of an issue for you!

Mobile/Anywhere Access

With Nomadesk, we had several quick and easy ways to access our files, with or without our laptops, wherever we were. The first option is the online dashboard. All we need to use the online dashboard is any internet-connected computer. The online dashboard allowed us to upload a single file or multiple files, download a file, preview photos, share files with FileLink, or activate TheftGuard to track a stolen computer and shred the files on that computer. The second option is using a Blackberry or iPhone. With a smartphone, we could access the special mobile version of the online dashboard. With the mobile online dashboard, we could send FileLinks and download important files on the go!

Affordability

Nomadesk is by far the most affordable way for small business, entrepreneurs, travelers and digital nomads to secure, back up and share data. For as little as $50 per year, Nomadesk offers all the benefits of a VPN, FTP, and backup system without the infrastructure investment. Nomadesk eliminates the cost of expensive servers and complex software.

Have a look at this digital nomad’s video:

If you want to learn more about Nomadesk, see their website at www.nomadesk.com/.

As always, if you need help with your computer or you have questions about finding the right service for you, contact us here at My Tech Team. Not a member yet? Sign up now!

• Manage your files better