Well it's started for me - I've started to put my data into the cloud. I have been using the cloud for a while, but only to setup web site hosting using the Amazon cloud. It was more a cost and quick availability to do. But now I've started to move files onto it.
My first steps this week were the move of some of my personal files. Had a bit of a shock this week when one of my notebooks started to play up. Whilst I could boot it up it was very unstable and ultimately I had to restore a backup I had made. (I don't do backups often, but did one a few weeks ago). I have so many memory sticks and external drives (two 1GB and one 400MB) as well as an old Dell server with several disks on them, I couldn't reliably tell you where everything was. Except for my main notebook.
So whilst the notebook was still booting up I all my files onto a disk and then onto Google Drive. (I already use Dropbox for work stuff with the young developers I work with). Then I restored the PC to a two week old image, attached Google Drive and my files were back.
I am however missing some email. The only things I have that weren't on Google Drive were my email and the small number of websites I work on. I did have backups of them, and although I am currently missing one week of my personal email I think I will be able to recover that from those backups.
I'll need to find a location for my websites using the cloud. In the meantime I am seeing what TFSpreview (Team Foundation Server Preview) is like for source control for my websites is like. I know it means my code is being held on some other server.
Next step is to look at options for hosting my email. Currently it is just POP/SMTP and all downloaded to my PC.
But, what would have happened had my notebook crashed. It wouldn't have been the end of the world. I did have backups - maybe a few weeks old. A few weeks ago that backup would have been a few months old.
What are the main issues with the cloud? There are in my mind two main issues. The first are privacy and security. There are private documents there - financial stuff, letters etc, although probably nothing that private and the financial information could probably be ascertained via a credit check. Can I trust suppliers of sites like Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft Skydrive?
The second is cost. At the moment, Google Drive is free (up to 5GB) and TFSPreview is free (although it is in a trial mode a free version will be available later). I'm not sure if my options for email via always be free - I'll report when I know that later. At the moment I am not "clouding" stuff like photos, movies, old letters, old code (that I refer to every now and then). But there will come a time I think that I'll be happy to pay for that. After the little shock this week when your one and only location of your latest stuff was playing up it was good to come out of the week with my data secure and backed up.
Final thing I did this weekend was get the Windows 8 Release Preview up and running on my old notebook. Partial reason was that I backed up (to disk) what was on this notebook and re-built this notebook as it wasn't used often, had Vista on it and I wanted to have a play with Windows 8 (I actually quite like it)
There were a few things I also setup cloud based. Firstly, Google Drive downloaded all my latest files and after installing Visual Studio for software development I pulled down some of the websites I was working on from TFSPreview.
Next was the Windows 8 can my Microsoft Live login for the machine. This should mean settings being saved with Microsoft Live and then new machines should have those settings. I also use Google Chrome for most of my browsing and had registered with Google (for things like Google Analytics). At some point I must have registered with Chrome and then when I logged in via Chrome my bookmarks came back on this machine (so they are now in sync). My shock was that I can't remember registering my bookmarks via Chrome.
Final thought about the cloud is your "apps" or programs you have bought. Whilst in the future I might be a cloud app user (I have used Google Apps and online Word for editing documents) I am not there yet. Looking at Windows 8 I think it will be a success for those users who want to browse the web, look at mail, instant messaging and show news/sport. All this can be done via Apps - they might never need to use the desktop at all. The cloud will know they use these apps, remember that, remember the settings and have the data in the cloud.
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