Cloud-based computing is a popular topic at the moment, and it’s opening up a plethora of possibilities for ways to interface with data. But to be honest, the way it’s helped me in the last 24 hours is much more important at the moment.
Tomorrow I’ve got the pleasure of speaking at a conference and everything was well-organised and prepared until a small error resulted in the saved presentation file being wiped off the face of the earth… And in a long story of unwise decisions cut short, there was no backup available. All presentation and all notes gone…
Except…
While I didn’t have the Word.doc with notes, I save pretty much everything I could ever want or need to reference. It’s tagged on Google Reader in the case of RSS feeds from about 200+ sites (My shared Google Reader items are here), and/or tagged on Diigo as a social bookmark. I use Diigo for two reasons – one: when I first started using it, the options for autoposting to blogs looked simpler to implement than Delicious, and two: It features an autoshare to Delicious option, meaning that I essentially have an automatic backup for either social bookmarking site.
Combined with a quick check of any relevant emails via Gmail, it means that pretty much every reference source is available at home, at work, or on the train if the wifi holds up.
And after the reminder about regular backups, I’ve made sure that it’s saved regular both on my laptop and removable hard drive. And even more useful is the fact it’s saved on Dropbox, which means it’s synched across laptop and desktop, available anywhere with an internet connection, and even better – if the presentation ends up too big for most corporate email services, I can easily share it via Dropbox for someone to download. Plus Dropbox has a 2GB storage limit for free.
I’m not saying any of this as any kind of paid endorsement (although free upgrades are nice, and paid advertising on here is never a bad thing), just as a public reminder about the benefits of backing up, and of using three services which are pretty much an essential part of my life now, and that I’d rather not do without.