If you read my post yesterday you know that my house was struck by lightning yesterday afternoon. My Macbook Pro, printer, scanner and some other gadgets got fried. I keep finding new things that aren’t working.
I had to get up, as usual, this morning and get to work. How would I survive without my trusty Macbook?
Thankfully my data is stored and accessible in a few different places. My current documents (and other stuff) are synced, moment by moment, with DropBox. DropBox has a copy of everything. When I save my document it’s immediately uploaded to their site. They aren’t the only game in town. There are several others, notably SugarSync and Box.net, and they’re all great. I have a free account with each of them and use them all from time to time.
I can access my DropBox files via the web interface from any machine. I’ve mostly been using my iPad today and can upload, download, edit and print documents, spreadsheets, etc. from DropBox.
I keep less than 2 GB of data on DropBox since that’s the limit of their free plan (I love free). When I have old stuff to save I upload it to my account on JungleDisk. I pay them and they’re cheaper than DropBox, but less convenient. They use the Amazon S3 Cloud servers and make them easy to use. I pay JungleDisk by the gigabyte. JungleDisk is also easily accessible from any machine and I can do pretty much the same things with those files that I can with the files on DropBox.
My email and calendar live on a Microsoft Exchange server hosted by Rackspace in Dallas. Again, I can access the data from anywhere with an internet connection via any device with a browser.
I’ve also got a bunch of notes, files, pictures, etc. in Evernote. I’ve been using those files all day via the iPad as well.
I use OmniFocus as my Todo system. My data lives on a free server in Switzerland and allows me to sync OmniFocus to my Macbook, iPad and iPhone.
I needed to access our firm financial data this afternoon. It’s stored on a server in Washington State with Atlas Networks. My iPad has a remote desktop client that allowed me to open up Quickbooks and do what needed doing.
Oh, one other thing, our home internet is dead as a doorknob. The Time-Warner people promised to be here today. No luck (they are a miserable breed of cable company). Now the claim to be coming on Saturday. We shall see. Our Verizon MiFi is serving us well. The whole house has internet.
The bottom line is that with this setup a dead computer is a non-event. All is good even in a disaster. My data is safe, sound and accessible and living in the cloud.
Related articles:
Lee Rosen has practiced family law for more than twenty years. With three offices, 
Pingback: remodeling marietta ga
Pingback: facebook123