Remote desktop services and power management

[#1]

I've been thinking about using one of the many remote desktop services (logmein.com, gotomypc.com, various apps). The problem is they all seem to assume your PC is on 24/7. I was hoping to find a way to put the PC to sleep remotely when not needed (e.g. before I disconnect -- that's relatively easy) and wake it up on demand. I thought eg the PC could be in hibernate mode, and WOL would wake it up when I tried to connect remotely. The problem is (a) I am not sure something like this can work (b) with all this noise traffic hitting my router, the PC would be mistakenly woken up all the time. Ideally of course there would be a router that would send a wake-up signal through the Ethernet after remote authentication -- i.e. random traffic would be blocked before it reached the PC. I suppose this can be done with remote router management and some fiddling with the firewall every time you connect remotely but it's too much trouble. I looked around for people with similar experiences but the vast majority of remote desktop users (primarily in the US) don't even seem to understand why I wouldn't want to leave the machine on 24/7. Shocking, but true! If I don't solve this I am afraid I will have to continue carrying my data with me.
Michael

[#2]

Yep, those folk in the USA seem to think that leaving multiple systems running all day is fine - even when they are on holiday! For some reason they don't think about fire risks, or electrical consumption!
Anyway, I've never once had much luck getting WOL to work from the internet. I know it IS apparently possible, but I never once managed to make it work.
Where the router is concerned, I think you would have to find a very high spec router to perform this. Mine clearly isn't quite upto the job but then 2 of these machines (being WOL enabled) don't even work with WOL for some reason!
Ah, isn't using 2nd hand equipment wonderful?

[#3]

The promotional material of logmein.com even shows a businessman on a tropical beach getting that fine balance between life and work right. When I pointed out the implication for energy waste in their forum I was told many businesses routinely leave all their machines on 24/7 anyway. That's alright then!
Hmm, it doesn't look very good then. Google doesn't return anything useful either. As if this never crossed anyone's mind. Strange. I even thought of connecting my 56K modem in autoanswer mode. Every time I would want to wake up the machine remotely I would home a ring first. I know the modem wakes up the PC. I would get some false positives but after some minutes of inactivity the PC would go into hibernate again.

[#4]

If its just the data you are after then how about on-line storage such as http://www.box.net/
If you would prefer to be in control, and have easy local access/updates. Then a NAS (Network Attached Storage) such as the;
Linksys NSLU2
Netgear SC101
Buffalo Linkstation
May be a solution.
Check the spec's but NAS often provides web or ftp access to your files which could be used over the internet. Power consumption is a lot lower than a PC.
Chilly

[#5]

Yes, there are several web hosted storage facilities and some even give you a remote desktop on their server. The NASes are impressive too -- I didn't know about those. But if possible I would really need access to my apps as well. For example, my mailer keeps messages from several years back, checks 5-6 accounts, has my addressbooks etc. Somehow I don't see this happening but being able to access my PC from anywhere would be bliss.