What is your productivity setup?
j-g-faustus: This is what I am using for a one-person home office:1. Gmail for everything, two accounts (private and work). I found Outlook folders more convenient than Gmail tags, but Gmail is great at being accessible from everywhere and works well enough that setting up my own Outlook server seems a waste of time and money. I have no other archive than Gmail, but if something is especially important (like an order or contract) I save it to the hard drive as well.2. That's a kludge, I haven't really found a good general solution. I have a standard directory structure for projects, and use a central Mercurial versioning system to share code between computers. I use 3-4 editors/IDEs, generally based on which editor has best support for that particular language. At the moment I use NetBeans for JavaScript and Ruby, Xcode for Go and Objective-C, TextWrangler for configuration, scripts etc. and Emacs when on Linux. Builds are generally shell or Ruby scripts.3. Manually. IM is generally turned off, I enable it only for specific conversations by appointment. Leaving it on constantly gives too many interruptions to get anything done.4. I have a Mac mini hooked up to the TV and hi-fi to handle all media. A Linux server provides a few TB media storage. (But this is entertainment, I don't use media for anything related to productivity.)5. All locally. I use a software called CrashPlan which autobackups my two Apple laptops to a central Linux server. On the server rsnapshot runs as a cron job for daily/weekly/monthly backups to an external disk. I would like an offsite or web snapshot as well - I might consider something like Mozy.com for a small subset of the most important data.6. In general: Whatever is simplest and cheapest. For mail and calendar, that's cloud based (Gmail and Google calendar), which also takes care of reconciling. For code, documents and accounting, it's local. Code is shared through Mercurial, documents through a shared folder on the local network. Backups are local mostly due to cost.