Learning to Love the Cloud

I’m grudgingly beginning to trust the cloud for my own use. It’s not so much a matter of it maturing as it is a triumph of convenience. Apple’s Photo Stream service, a part of iCloud, is proving to be useful enough that I’m actually considering upgrading my work desktop from Windows XP to Windows 7, a move which I’ve put off out of pure mulishness.

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Until now, I’ve used a combination of e-mail and cable connections to move screenshots off of the iToys that I use in my testing, but Photo Stream works well enough that in a few more weeks, the only times that I’ll plug a cable into a device is to charge it or to connect it to a TV.On top of that, I’m smack dab in the middle of the time that I set aside every year for resolving to do better with backup up the systems scattered about my house, as part of my Week of Disaster Preparedness. Why this week?

Well, as any long-time Bay Area resident can tell you, Monday was the 22nd anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake – famous for disrupting the only World Series that Oakland and San Francisco have contested so far, as well as the transportation headache caused by a snapped bridge and collapsed freeway- and Thursday is the 20th anniversary of the Oakland Hills fire, which wiped out two and a half square miles of residential neighborhoods in Oakland and Berkeley.

So, even though I’m only going to be here for another year or so, I’m cleaning out my go-bag this week. But in addition to refreshing my food and water, and checking other essentials, I think this is the year that I take the hard drive out for good; instead of updating the system images, I’m going to surprise myself if I don’t start backing up to a cloud service of one kind or another.