Ah, that sinking feeling: You’ve just left for a business trip when you realize you’ve forgotten the PowerPoint presentation on your PC at home. No matter: With the right tools in hand, you’ll be able to retrieve your file regardless of where you are.

Not necessarily. It’s hard to ignore MS Office, but you don’t need to blow 400 bucks to get your work done. In fact, you don’t need to install any programs at all. Sign up for the free Google Docs (documents.google.com) or Zoho (zoho.com), and you can do everything in a Web browser. The programs look similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint and offer all the same features (save for a few lesser-used ones like certain spreadsheet formulas). Zoho even kicks in a few extra applets like a Wiki-building tool. Best of all, these applications let you access your files from any computer that’s online.

If you don’t have reliable Internet access or are more comfortable installing programs on your computer, there’s no shortage of competition, either.

So you finally finished writing your novel and then somehow accidentally dumped it? It happens. Luckily, when you delete a file from your computer’s trash bin, it’s actually just marked for deletion. That means it can be overwritten on your hard drive by other data, but there’s a good chance it’s still intact—for a while, anyway.

Its a common problem: You have Microsoft Outlook at work, a different e-mail program at home, and a smartphone in your pocket, all with independent inboxes and outboxes. Ideally, all your devices should communicate, so that when you receive or reply to a message on one, its reflected on all of them. But they dont do that.

Wise question. I wish I had asked it before leaving my phone and two years worth of numbers in a taxi. Fortunately, backup systems abound. If you go through cellphones like toilet paper, try the Universal Pro kit ($80; datapilot.com). It includes cables that let you transfer data to your computer from just about any phone, and it syncs with Microsoft Outlook.