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Setting up mixed cloud and mobile computing

By utilising the power of mobile computing with a cloud storage provider, you can (in theory) take your hard drive anywhere with you, with nothing more than a username and password.
By Zack Whittaker, Contributor
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This photo gallery should hopefully show you how to mobilise and virtualise an entire hard drive, enabling you to work anywhere and do anything.

See Virtualize your life - mixing mobility and cloudivity in Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog.
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Create a virtual machine on a physical computer. In this case, it's a Windows XP virtual machine on my laptop and I'm using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to create and install the virtual machine. You can of course use VMWare or any other virtualisation software for this.

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Now I'm adding the folder to Live Mesh, to store the folder and the contents in the cloud so I can access it anywhere. I've set it to synchronise with my desktop machine, but you could also leave it in the cloud to be downloaded from anywhere should you wish.

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Here it's adding the folder and the virtual machine contents to the cloud, and will start synchronising with my desktop computer instantly. Considering I'm trying to synchronise an entire hard drive (in this case 1.7GB) it'll take a while to do, even on local area networks.

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The folder now knows it is part of my Live Mesh, and adds the Mesh client to the side of my folder. It shows that all of my devices, including my Live Desktop are all online.

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In my Live Desktop, where I can see all of my synchronised files and folders across my mesh, I can see it has begun uploading my virtual machine files.

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You'll know when the files have been added to the mesh once the News pane gets updated.

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Moving onto my desktop computer, a new folder appears on my desktop. This is my synchronised folder from my laptop, containing my virtual machine files.

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I open it up and there they are ready to be used.

(Although I can't work out why the newly synchronised hard drive has increased in size slightly... )
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I quickly add my synchronised virtual machine into Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on my desktop computer, and there you have your virtual machine, working exactly as it did on the previous machine.

See Virtualize your life - mixing mobility and cloudivity in Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog.

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