I live a life populated by many machines. I have three computers at home, a Palm PDA, a notebook in my bag, and a desktop in my office.

Let me tell you, organizing and maintaining information across all these machines is a pain in the butt. I never know where a particular file might reside, and I'm always frightened that I'll lose a file somewhere in the chain, or that a machine will crash, and something important will disappear.

I've been using i-drive to save important files, but now I've found something better. It's called FusionOne, and it's designed to keep your desktop, notebook, and Palm Pilot files and other information synced up.

Here's how it works. You log onto the site and then register each machine under your unique user ID. FusionOne installs itself on that machine, and then walks you through a dialog where you select what you want to synchronize. You can sync up contacts, appointments, email, and to-do lists stored in Microsoft Outlook, browser favorites lists, and file folders. The system defaults to just synchronizing the My Documents folder, but you can actually sync up any folder you would like.

During installation, selected folders and applications are synced up with your personal 25-MB storage bin located on FusionOne's website. That takes a little while, but once it's done, you're ready to go.

After installing FusionOne on all of my systems, including the Palm PDA, I suddenly found that everything really was synced up. Finally, all of my Word files, stored in the My Documents folder, were available on whatever machine I happened to be on. My calendar was up to date. Even my email folders in Outlook were synchronized, so I didn't have to worry about which machine was storing what message.