One of the nice things about blogging for a living is that you are not constrained to a stationary office. If you get tired of the scenery at home, all you have to do is pack up the laptop and head for the nearest coffee shop. As easy as it is to get up and move, there are three tools that I recommend you look into before you leave the house.

These three tools will come in handy because they make the transition easier, faster and safer. Best of all, these tools are all affordable (or free). I use all of these tools regularly and can tell you from firsthand experience that they are worth the little time it takes to set them up.

1. SpiderOak

SpiderOak is a simple tool that keeps your alternative to torrent work files synced between your home computer and your laptop. With SpiderOak, you can start a blog post on your home computer and then finish it on the laptop at Starbucks without having to e-mail the half-finished post to yourself. SpiderOak creates a shared folder on both computers and every file that you save inside that folder is updated at both computers automatically.

Dropbox is another syncing service that does pretty much the same thing as SpiderOak. However, I like SpiderOak better because it hasn’t suffered from the same security issues as Dropbox. Additionally, SpiderOak takes a zero-knowledge approach to your data storage. This means SpiderOak employees are unable to access or even view your files.

You can try SpiderOak for free by visiting their website and signing up for an account. You’ll get 2 GB of free storage space that you can use forever. I have been living off my 2 gigs for years now and still haven’t run out of space. If you do need to upgrade, plans start out at $10a month.