SMF 9/3/12 Keep your files with you and backed up.

Hi everybody,

http://www.hot-deals.org/deal/398d9d8eb56405a3aa2d2c4321cdbbca/

There are 25 gigs of online, backed up storage with your name on them.  Go get 'em.  Because when your stuff is on the cloud, anything with a web browser can access them.  That's right.  Your tablet, your laptop, your desktop, your droid, even your iphone and kindle fire I think.  More importantly, you won't be one of those people paying hundreds of dollars to tech support the next time your computer fails, or smartphone gets hit by a bus or bent between the spokes of your bicycle (see previous articles for THAT story).

When I worked at the Bates helpdesk, the toughest calls were the people who had their thesis all saved on one floppy disk.  The only copy.  Now, back then, dinosaurs roamed the earth, but they did have flash drives and CDs.  They also had email, so the people could have emailed themselves.  But instead, they would prowl around the helpdesk just before we opened, and then give us long sob stories about how they couldn't possibly put in that much time again, so could we please do anything we could to fix their problem.  Well, we did.  And sometimes we were able to fix the issues.

Long story short, don't use floppy disks.  Ever.  They're not floppy anymore so that's no fun, and they break a lot.  Don't use only flash drives or hard drives either, because they fail too.  Use the free 25 gigs of storage that's up there today, or google drive, or microsoft's version of it.  You don't have to put all your files up there, but at least the ones that you will really miss like your photos and your SENIOR THESIS.

One last time, here's the deal: for online, backed up cloud storage to fail, redundant servers in several places would all have to die at once.  If CA fell into the sea, iron mountain was nuked, and the zombie-pocalypse got the rest of us, maybe the data would be gone.  But by then, all any of us would be thinking about was BRAINS!, so your thesis on the calculus of the pygmy aboriginals would probably not be read anyway :)

~Mark