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Much of the business world may already be virtual—with employees working at home or in remote locations, e-mail and web conferences replacing face-to-face meetings, and increasing use of instant messaging—but there is still a barrier to having complete freedom and mobility in the workplace, and that is the physical location of the files you need.

Picture this: You're working at home and you need a file that is still on your work PC; or you're at work and you realize you left an important document on your computer at home; or you're on the road and the laptop you brought doesn't have the right files, or has outdated versions.

In each case, work grinds to a halt. Some people try to solve this problem by carrying USB thumb drives with them that hold all their important files, but synchronizing a thumb drive is something that's easy to forget until it's too late. Remote access to your work and/or home computer is another solution, but many companies provide VPN (virtual private network) access only to a select few.

So you either don't get any work done, or you go into a meeting unprepared, or you have to get a co-worker to e-mail you a document, and so on.

Wouldn't it be great if there were some easy way of keeping your updated files with you, without having to, well, have them with you? A number of solutions have started to emerge, in the form of web-based backup services that allow individuals and companies to keep copies of documents and files on a remote server.

Google and Microsoft are also rumoured to be working on more advanced versions of this, which would automatically synchronize files, photos and other documents with whatever computer you happen to be using, so you would always have the most current version.

Although many corporate IT and legal departments would have security concerns with such a system if an employee were using it for sensitive material, most companies already use remote storage for backups and use external providers for all kinds of sensitive information.

Provided the appropriate security controls are used, using an Internet service for backups should be no different.

As computer storage has become cheaper, and high-speed Internet access has become more readily available, a number of companies have started offering backup solutions that effectively duplicate whatever documents or files you specify and upload them to a remote system somewhere. They include Xdrive—recently bought by America Online—as well as Omnidrive, Box.net, Mozy and Carbonite.

All offer a series of pricing levels, depending on how much data a user or company wants to store and how many times they can restore that data from the company's servers. Carbonite offers unlimited storage for just $5 a month, while Mozy offers 2 gigabytes free and 30 gigabytes for $5 a month, Box.net offers one gigabyte free and 5 gigabytes for $5 a month, and so on. Amazon.com, the giant on-line retailer, offers something called Simple Storage Service, or S3, which allows companies to automatically back up their files onto Amazon's servers at a cost of 15 cents per gigabyte per month, not including bandwidth charges. That's cheap enough and easy enough that small- and medium-sized web businesses are already making use of Amazon's storage service. Smugmug, a large photo-sharing service, uses S3 for a substantial portion of its back-end file storage.

What Google is reportedly working on goes a little farther than just a remote backup service. The technology known as GDrive, according to industry sources who have knowledge of the project, is designed to create a continuous synchronization of files between Google's server farms and whatever computer a user is working on. Any file that was changed—whether it was a Word document, an image file, a PowerPoint presentation or theoretically even an e-mail message—would be saved periodically, so that a user could switch machines and instantly pick up wherever he left off.

According to experts in creating such databases this is no trivial feat, so Google's propensity for hiring math and programming PhDs would no doubt come in handy.

The search-engine giant made it clear that it sees such a service in its future during a presentation to analysts earlier this year, in which Eric Schmidt spoke about what would be possible with unlimited storage and unlimited Internet access.

Microsoft is also said to be working on a file-synchronization service known as Live Drive, which will be tied in with the rest of the company's products, including Word, Excel and Outlook—or perhaps with the second-tier version of those products known as Microsoft Works, which the company has said it may offer as a web-based application suite.

Having a Microsoft connection may also help some companies get comfortable with a remote-file backup or synchronization service, because they are used to dealing with the company's software on other levels, and are less likely to worry about their data escaping into the Wild West of the Internet.

Whoever provides it, the “Internet hard drive” seems close to becoming a reality, and that could prove to be a lifesaver for many remote workers.