Originally Posted by chgoeditor

I'm self-employed and I like to travel. I never tell my clients, "I'm going on vacation for a month...hold all requests until I'm back." In fact, they seldom know whether I'm working from home or a hotel room halfway across the world. Needless to say, I always have a laptop with me while traveling.

That said, I grapple with a few issues while traveling:
* I need to have access to all of my files while on the road, because it's tough to predict which ones I may need at any given time.
* I want to ensure that everything is backed up at all times in case my laptop gets stolen.
* For trips where I'm moving from location to location, I'd prefer to travel with something lighter than my Dell XPS 15", which can get heavy.

Because of some Chicago commitments, I haven't done much international travel in the last two years. Before that, I used a two-prong approach that seemed to work, but wouldn't any more:
* I traveled with an Asus netbook
* I used Windows Live Mesh to sync files between the Asus and my home laptop, so all of my client files and trip photos would be saved at home in case something happened to my Asus. (It would be set to push new files from my Asus to my home computer, but files that were deleted from my Asus remained on my home computer in the event the Asus got stolen and wiped clean.)

Windows Live Mesh is shuttered, so that option no longer works to sync files, and I hate my Asus with a passion--inevitably I'd have wrist pain at the end of a long trip because it's so un-ergonomically friendly.

I'd love suggestions on how I can tackle this for future trips. Preferably solutions that don't cost an arm and a leg, and aren't particularly complicated to set up. FWIW:
* I have NAS on my home network (a 1 TB Buffalo drive), but I don't know how to access it remotely (if that's even possible).
* I have a Carbonite subscription for one laptop, but could upgrade to a subscription with more features.
* I use Google Drive for some client documents, but not everything.
* I have a free Dropbox account that is full and have free subscriptions to some other backup services that I'm not using. The largest is probably Box.com, where I think I have 20GB.
* I'm a Windows user. Main laptop is running Windows 7 Home Premium. I'm probably a year away from needing to replace my main laptop, but I'd be willing to consider a low-cost (lightweight) 2nd laptop.
* In my ideal world, I'd use this same solution at home so I always had a backup laptop that had a mirrored copy of all of my files in the event my main laptop broke or needed repairs.

Thanks for any and all suggestions!