I've always worked from home, even though I (now) only live about 8 mins walk from uni. As a lot of people said, my office is too noisy for me to work in also.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know what I do with files & data, in case it's of any use to you.

Working from USB memory stick is a good idea, but if you go between macs and PCs a lot, the sticks tend to die, and if that's the only updated copy of your work, you'll be a bit scuppered!

So I use dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/ to store everything online and use it as my main storage. I have a copy dropbox downloaded on every machine I work on (currently running 3 in the house), so when you update a file on one machine, it will get updated on all machines.

You can also access your files without installing the software by logging on to their website and logging in.

I tend to work on files saved at dropbox, then at lunch time and end of the day, I make a copy of all files onto whatever machine I'm working on (this is just in case their website dies or something). Once a week I download all files to my USB stick also, and back up all machines once a month... yes I am a bit paranoid about losing my work!

HTH :)

I'd recommend Dropbox too. I wish I'd found it sooner - I only found it near the end of my PhD - but it was a really big help, allowing me to work on multiple computers at home, and access my work when I was occasionally at the uni. I backed up lots of other ways too, but it was mainly my way of file sharing.

I also work from home, we have a dept office for PhD students but its shared and can be noisy, although tbh these days we all seem to work from home anyway! I have all my stuff here, I can just come down, grab a cuppa, put on the computer and get on rather than driving 30 mins to uni, get parked, walk to campus etc etc. We tend to meet with out sup once a month or so and have constant email correspondence so it works well. He's not on campus every day either so there's not much point being there - the lecturers never go near the PhD students' office anyway lol. I don't have to worry about leaving the dogs, the school run is 5 minutes rather than 40 mins, it all works very well :-)
What I would say, as the others have pointed out, watch out for problems relating to isolation, it can be very lonely and quite demoralising at times, but if you can work something out where you are at home most of the time and pop in once a week/fortnight then you should get the best of both worlds :-)

I also work from home mainly. My uni is only 30min away but I just don't fancy taking in papers and books etc in everyday. I don't drive and it's just too much to carry. I like the freedom of being at home as well - e.g. eating and drinking whenever I like, watch bit of TV at lunch break etc. But I do go into uni every so often for little jobs like photocopying, printing and meetings etc so I don't really feel isolated. In fact I like the fact that I'm away from the gossips and department politics - not my cup of tea.

I used dropbox.com before but it never became a habit. I now use Google Document. It's just like a filestore where you can upload files - word, excel, etc. I uploaded SPSS datasets onto there too and use it as a on-line backup as well as for when I work at uni.