Thanks to the internet, information is readily available anywhere and everywhere. From desktops and laptops to mobile devices, even TVs! The internet has expanded beyond just making information available anywhere to include services that let you store some files, manipulate others, share all of it, and be able to access all your information from any computer that has internet access. There are a lot of pros and cons to working in the cloud. The biggest con is that it requires the internet, and usually fast internet. Of the pros, the best seems to be that you can access all of your stuff from ANY computer connected to the internet, and as smart phones get smarter, they can help keep you connected to your Cloud services. This school year, I challenge myself to do as much as I can in the cloud.
The college world can be demanding, but the internet is ever changing; adapting to whatever needs the users can come up with. There will be papers to write, research to be done, presentations to give, group projects, all sorts of of expectations and requirements. Nothing would be worse than a hardware failure and losing all of your projects and data. Last week, I received a frantic call from a web designer friend who was working on images for a site. She would edit them and place the finished images on her external HD. Her HD was brushed off the table and fell two feet, just enough to really mess things up. I did what I could over the phone to help her, but my best advice was to begin re-editing the images as fast as she could for her deadline that afternoon. It goes to show that these setbacks are random, sometimes inevitable, and always inconvenient. So it's better to be proactive rather than reactive. I mentioned to her about services such as Dropbox that would easily let her sync incomplete folder from work to her home computer so she can wrap them up and sync them back with her computer at work. This is part of the reason I want to relocate all that I can into the cloud. To be preventative about losing data.
Another reason is that new, upcoming operating systems are going to migrate into the cloud. Chrome OS, Google's OS, is going to be purely in the cloud. The profile you sign into will be your Google account that all Google services are linked to. I believe this to be the first of many OSs to make such a leap into the cloud. Alongside this OS, Google's been providing so many cloud based services and features that it's almost more of a challenge to remain out of the cloud. Google Mail keeps 8 GBs of emails available to you at any computer with an internet connection. Google Docs keeps a variety of types of documents at your fingertips for editing or sharing. Google Calendar is a great tool for scheduling and with the new tasks feature set (also integrated with GMail) then tracking school assignments doesn't get easier. Picasa will let you store and edit all of your pictures. Google Voice (also integrated with GMail) can keep you connected with all your friends, family and coworkers right from your computer! Even though Google seems to have saturated the cloud market with all of it's projects, there are many other websites that provide powerful web based services for your cloud computing pleasure.
If you haven't been using Dropbox, you must have been living under a rock. Sign up, and in no time you'll have 2 free GB of space that you can sync across any number of computers. Not enough space for you? Refer other users to the site to expand the size of your account up to a whopping 10 GB! Aside from the obvious use of keeping files synced between 2 or more computers, sometimes I need to transfer large files across the internet. With Dropbox's fast connection, I can upload to them, and download it on the other side faster than a direct connection across the internet could ever accomplish (at least for residential accounts like mine, it's faster).
There are so many sites popping up that I can't take the time to list them all (although here is a pretty good list of some of them). My goal this year is to take advantage of as many of these services as I can as alternatives to desktop software. By next summer, I want to be able to sit down behind any computer/device with the internet and have equal access to all of my files.
Advice, Misc
cloud, dropbox, google, internet