Clone Your Laptop Before You Leave
Yes, this is another form of backup, but it is extremely important. Think about all the applications that you have installed on your laptop. How long would it take to find the orignal disks or download the software and reinstall them? To locate all the serial numbers? To tweak your settings and preferences back to they way that you like them? You could be talking, literally, days. With a complete cloned copy, you could go so far as to purchase a new laptop, clone everything back over, and be up, running and productive in a couple hours.

Economize on Internet Access
Expenses sneak up on you on the road, and one of the bills that can run up fast is high-speed internet access. It doesn't seem like much at the time, but if you pay $10/night for high speed connectivity at the hotel, stop at Starbucks for a latte and email, and connect while waiting for that delayed flight at the airport, you can easily spend $100 for a week's worth of intermittent access. Here are a couple ways to help hold that number down:

• Stay in hotels that offer free internet access. An obvious one, no doubt, but more and more chains seem to be extending this courtesy. If it isn't free in-room, see if your lodging provides free access in the lobby or a lounge area. Not as convenient, but the price is right. And no matter what else you do, stay away from the "business centers" in higher-end hotels. That sucking sound isn't from the housekeeping vaccum cleaner.
  
  
• Use Dial-Up
  Remember what we said about keeping that old America Online account around? You don't have to spend the money for AOL to have dial-up access. Many ISPs have terrific local access number coverage. NetZero makes finding their access numbers easy by an area code-and-exchange look-up so that you are assured of not having any toll fees. As of this writing, for $9.95/month, you can have a dial-up account for the price of overnight high speed access in many hotels. Beware of hotel charges for per-minute local calls, or "blocks" of "free" time that lead into per-minute charges if a call goes beyond that limit.
  
  Yes, yes, I know. Dial-up is s-l-o-w. So fire up your Mac, set it to check email and then go to dinner or get in the shower rather than watching impatiently as the progress bar crawls across the screen. Do the same for large file downloads or uploads. Let your Mac work for you while you are busy with something else, and save money in the process.
  
  
• Beg or Borrow
  Contact your client, business associate or whomever you are traveling to meet, and see if they will give you access to their office's network. If attending a trade show or conference, see what options they have available on-site. Arrive early or stay late and get your online work done without having to suffer the drudgery of dial-up or the expense of hotel high speed.
  

Backup...Coming, Going and While There
I've been accused of being a bit paranoid when it comes to backup methods. Having been burned once, however, I don't ever want to be burned again. There are few things more frustrating than having to re-create work that you've already done. If you share that feeling, then consider any or all of these backup methods to be sure you have what you need with you when you get there, and all the work you completed while away is safe and secure upon your return.

• Backup critical data and/or clone your hard drive before leaving.
• Burn essential files to CD or DVD to take with you, and while on the road.
  
• Copy essential files to your USB Flash Drive before you leave, and while on the road
  
• Copy essential files to your iDisk before you leave, and while on the road.
  
• Email copies of important files to yourself at an address you don't check while on the road.
  
• Use Apple Remote Desktop to copy working files back to your home machine.
  
• Set your email client to leave messages on the server for the duration of your trip.
  

Use Network Profiles
The Network Preferences pane allows you to set up and save an almost unlimited number of location preferences. While your home Mac may not benefit from this capability, your mobil Mac is the perfect place to take full advantage. Set up a location to access your home network, office network, and any other places you visit frequently (remote offices, hotels, etc.). Once completed, changing settings becomes a menu selection rather than a juggling act of finding and keying the appropriate DNS and IP numbers.