As more and more people get onto the web using faster means the idea of storing files offsite becomes more practical. There are already some programs in place, like Amazon's S3 and OmniDrive, which are designed for developers to use. However there are very few that are available for the end user.

You can always use your .Mac account to sync files between machines, though some people find that the .Mac service can be a bit pokey at times. It's great for backup but not for online file access.

SugarSync (sugarsync.com) is a cross-platform file syncing and access service designed to allow people to leave their files up on the secure storage space of SugarSync and to have them available on any platform anywhere. There's a Mac client beta that allows Mac users to get in on the action of configure-once, access anywhere support and since the service includes web access to documents, iPhone (and other PDA), users can get their files from any web browser-anywhere.

The syncing software manages the connection between a local directory and the online files, and allows you to choose which files live where.

That's a huge service and it comes with an un-huge price. Just $24.99 a year gets you 10GB of space and just $249.99 a year gets you 250GB of space. With that amount of space, it's feasible to put one's digital archive online, enabling anywhere-access to it.

It took me about 10 seconds to set up a test account and about 15 seconds to download their software. The client software is a breeze. Pick a folder you want to sync and it uploads that directory to the server. I've now got both a Macbook Pro and a Mac Pro uploading files to the service. Once they're done, those two devices will stay in sync and I can make changes locally which will be reflected on my other drives automatically.

My only issue is their top-end account is 250GB. I can pretty easily imagine wanting to put more data than that up on the servers, if I were syncing a Mac.

We've been warned that the Mac beta doesn't handle lots of little files very well (like emails) and that they know about this, that's something that might need to wait until the spring when this comes out as its.