Entries tagged with “WebApp” from streamline/online
Dropbox has become my replacement for USB thumb drives. It functions in the cloud, but unlike the iDisk and other remote storage technologies. Instead of mounting a drive to hold your files, you download and install a small application. The application places a folder on your desktop, the contents of which are synced to online storage automatically. Once installed on multiple computers and devices (e.g., the iPhone), you always have your updated files at hand. And when you're on someone else's computer, you can access your files via a web interface. It's slick, and it's free. You pay for extra storage space over the first 2GB.
I've been busily creating to-do lists since my third year at Kent State, when it became obvious there is a better way to live than worrying if you are forgetting something every moment of the day. Once I decided to make the slow shift to being As Paperless As Possible, I searched for ways to keep my lists on my computers and PDA. After trying several possible solutions, I finally settled on a great piece of software called OmniOutliner and used it religiously for a few years. It became impractical over time, however, because one soon learns that--despite owning a laptop and a PDA--you are sometimes on the road with neither and need access to your lists. Additionally, OmniOutliner doesn't sync with PDAs, limiting its usefulness to only when near the computer.
I began using Backpack as a web-based alternative and have been keeping my lists there for a year and a half. Over time, using Backpack created a shift in my overall thinking: if I am going to house all this data in a digital format, why in God's name would I want to bind it to my laptop drive that (a) is too small to hold everything; (b) can only be one place at a time, perhaps a place where you are not when you need the info most; and (c) is guaranteed to fail at the most inopportune time? (I've lived through a few hard drive crashes. One was especially bad--a physical crash of the drive--and the data has been lost forever. I am notoriously bad about backups; that is, I don't do any.)
The answer became obvious: I am paying out the wazoo for unlimited high-speed internet access, so I may as well put it to good use by storing all this vital information off-site. There are benefits to this strategy. First, hard drive space offered by these companies typically exceed what is available on my physical laptop drive (within limits, of course). Second, we assume such companies make routine backups of your data, increasing the safety factor over my less rigorous methods. Additionally, with free high-speed access available many places in even smaller cities, your data is never too far away.
For a short time, I used a paid Backpack account to begin storing this data remotely. Recently, however, I have decided that making monthly payments seemed silly when I could house the data on the iPower server I use to host my various web sites. I installed MediaWiki, the same software used by Wikipedia. This will be the storehouse for all of my text and image files. I wondered briefly if I could also use this remote storage space as a place to back up all my other files. However, Mac OS X has trouble natively and transparently connecting to remote servers using FTP. Even when you are able to make the connection, the drive space is read only, which makes backing up to the server space an impossibility. If anyone has suggestions on this, I'd love to hear it.
