Seeing Clouds from Both Sides Now

It was one of those days where the basics of computing changed for me. I find it interesting how much of life is a fluke. I hadn't intended to shift how I do things until a few hours ago. It all started with today's announcement of the release of Google Drive. I checked and it hadn't yet been rolled out to me. So, I tweeted the following: "Why no 'drive' for me yet, Google? I've increasingly permitted you take over my computing life. I want a reward."

I was wondering if their free storage would replace my use of Dropbox. To me, that service has been a replacement from needing a flash drive, which simply replaced floppies all the way back to 5.25" ones.

When looking around on the web this afternoon, I saw a link to a graph showing a comparison of cloud services. I had known about Microsoft's SkyDrive since it was first released and used it exactly never.

Yet, I saw a discussion following the article which said how Microsoft had released the SkyDrive app for Windows. Hum. As a special promotion, they offered a free upgrade to 25GB. Regardless of how much free space I've got, in my gut, I know I can never have enough. I clicked through to upgrade.



I put the app on both main home computers. It seems so seamless inside Windows. For quite some time, I had been accessing my documents on my media server over wifi. This meant for example, my actual financial data resided on that PC but I access it mostly from a laptop. Networking can always be a bit flaky though, especially now that I've set the media server to hibernate after just ten minutes of inactivity.

So, I copied all my document data to SkyDrive. I can write and read from either computer and every file is accessible from anywhere via the web interface. Now my only problem is trying to find enough useful stuff to pack 25GB of free cloud storage.