FILEing for separation

Since my first day in the professional world I have gone out of my way to keep work and personal things, on my computer; separate. Files, email accounts, bookmarks, all of them are divided into two camps.

For files, everything either goes into folders titled AllYancy or AllWork. Easy as pie. This way I can point the corporate backup at AllWork and my personal USB drive at AllYancy.

For email, work email is work email; only. Well except for the times I wanted to show off and give out yancy_lent@lotus.com. I just don't get those who give all their friends their work addresses, and then they get a different job… and another. You can add ISP's to this as well. Around here the names change all the time or you get a better deal and have to change it. Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail seem like safe bets; ok, you never know about the first one.

For bookmarks and overall browsing things get sloppy. I use FireFox and like to keep everything forever, url history, type-ahead fields. The problem with all of this is when you have eyes over your shoulder or you're in a meeting and you start typing. This is where I switch to squeaky clean IE. Not because I'm hiding anything, I just don't want to take attention off the meeting topic. I work with someone that keeps all her bookmarks pin'd open. I really don't need like reading all of her diet website titles… but must.

To expand on the browser experience, for backing things up you can't beat FireFox, you need only copy two folders and you have everything, url cache, type ahead values and uname and password cache. Simply install FireFox on another computer then overlay the two folders.. iiiiiidentical.

This is where the separation comes into place. I have been using VM's for a couple years now as a way to manage my employers demo environment. I have gotten to the point where I trust the group of files that make up a VM to that of a PC. (I was always worried about file corruption; that's yet to happen).  So it occurred to me; why not create and use a personal VM?

This could make things very easy to manage. Backups, easy, one folder. Email, browsing, done, they're all done in a vacuum. Resources, the host would run SUPER clean for it would only need a couple base applications running. I could run all my apps in my personal VM and just save the ‘work' files to a mapped drive on the host. This way I can use work mail and IM; Notes and Sametime respectively, without having to switch back and forth.

It would take some time to get use to but seems well worth the exercise. It's officially on the list.