One might properly conclude from prior stories that I have become a real believer in Cloud Computing. From a personal perspective, the vision is simple. All of my documents, contacts, calendar entries, photos, music, patrickWeb content, and backup files safely and securely kept in various clouds. All contacts, calendar entries, and selected songs and pictures, and email synchronized and accessible on the iPhone. Everything else accessible via the iPhone browser or any browser or any computer, anywhere, anytime. It is that simple. Oh, how I wish. The vision is attainable and I am confident that it will happen in 2009 — but, there is a way to go.
Let’s start with the easy parts. Effective and simple backup has been elusive for me for decades and much has been written here about the subject. Finally, a solution is in place that I am comfortable with. It has two parts to it. First is idrive.com. The service is free for up to 2 GB. You simply identify which files and folders are critical and it keeps them backed up in the idrive cloud. Very simple interface and you can’t beat the price. I have been using the service on two Windows ThinkPads in the house and have been extremely pleased with how it works..
The other half of the solution is the Iomega one terabyte StorCenter. The six-pound marvel plugs right into the home LAN in the basement. Very inexpensive and easy to setup. I use it to back up really big files and Linux ThinkPads. It is set up as an I: drive and is accessible just like the C: drive. It is connected via gigabit ethernet so copying files to and from the box is lightning fast. Like the predecessor I had been using for years, it is RAID storage, so there are always redundant copies of everything. The box is smaller than half a shoe box and it uses roughly $3 per month in electricity. The predecessor used $30 per month, so the justification to spend $250 on the StorCenter was very simple.
There are two applications on my desktop that keep me chained to Windows and which I backup every time I use them. First is Quicken, which I I have been using since Release 1.0 back in the early 1980’s. As I wrote in Net Attitude seven years ago, the web version is not a viable alternative. Unfortunately, that is still true today. In theory a web-based application like Mint.com and others could replace Quicken but they just are not up to it quite yet. The other workhorse for me is Dreamweaver, which I use to manage patrickWeb. In theory there are many web based alternatives but I have yet to find one that is as powerful and easy to use. Eventually, I expect both of these to be "in the clouds" but not quite yet.
Now, on to the more interesting things. Photos are all in the Picasa cloud and music is in iTunes. No particular issues with either of them. Next is email. I started using email in the early 1980’s with a system at IBM called PROFS. In 1994 the company email system became Lotus Notes. I was an early adopter and in the beginning there was nobody to send email to! When I e-tired in 2001 I switched to Microsoft Outlook so I could be like everybody else that I attended tech conferences with. As with many people I know, it developed into a love-hate relationship. The Lotus and Microsoft mail solutions are great in many respects but in a way you are chained to someone’s central infrastructure with them. I was looking for freedom. Along came gmail and, bingo, I was liberated. Or so I thought. The mail part of it was easy. Gmail is lightning fast and although it is a "cloud" application with all the user functionality appearing in the browser, it acts like a desktop application and I can use it on the Ubuntu Linux ThinkPad in the kitchen, a Windows PC in the workshop, or any computer anywhere. And freedom from Outlook — almost, expect for contacts and calendar entries, my lifeblood.
Contacts and calendar entries were still in Outlook but they synchronized with MobileMe which in turn synchronized with the iPhone. Seems a bit convoluted but it worked. Some occasional glitches but it was acceptable. How to add a new contact or modify a calendar entry? Could do it with Outlook but that would defeat the purpose behind my strategy. MobileMe might actually be the perfect cloud application. It was awkward at first and Apple definitely had some problems as chronicled here before, but I began to get used to it. Apple appeared to have fixed the most serious bugs, and I actually began to like it. However, as I got to be really dependent on MobileMe I found a lot of shortcomings. Calendar invitations did not work. Contacts would at times "go missing". The MobileMe page would hang up in certain browsers under certain conditions. Bottom line — MobileMe proved to be extremely slow and unreliable. It had to go. It became clear that the solution was Google contacts and Google calendar. I was getting sucked in — just as Google no doubt hopes we all will. Quickly getting over the issue of having all my eggs in Google’s basket, the bigger issue became how to get there from here.
MobileMe not only has huge performance problems it is also a closed proprietary system, just like iTunes and most everything Apple does. Some people fear Google but what gives me comfort is that they use Internet standards and they provide both import and export from any of their applications. Their only lock on you is that their stuff works really well and you get addicted. MobileMe is a one way system — easy to import things to it but you can not export. Maybe you can if you have a Mac but not with the hodgepodge of Windows and Linux systems on my home LAN. No problem. I synched back to Outlook, exported from Outlook, and then imported to Google. Good riddance to MobileMe. Now everything is in Google. Calendar invitations work. Contacts are nicely integrated with the calendar and with email and with maps and documents that I choose to share. Microsoft has good reason to fear Google. Their cloud approach is far superior to the heavy-weight desktop approach of Outlook and Office. Google is not without faults, however. There are issues when importing and at one point I lost all the contacts and calendar entries and had to stitch everything back together from various snippets and backups. It was worth the pain.
Google Docs is still a work in progress but highly worth using. You can email documents to Google docs but not pdf files. You can upload pdfs but only one at a time. There are issues with printing certain things and various other shortcomings, but having documents in the cloud assures they are continuously backed up. You can share them with others and work on them anytime from anywhere.
The biggest gap with the Google cloud is that it doesn’t synchronize contacts and calendar entries with the iPhone. Ooops. I am sure they want to offer synch and that it is not a technical issue. It is an Apple issue for sure. I found two third-party applications in the app store that not only work with Google but also provide extra functionality on the iPhone than the basic calendar and contact manager that comes with it. I can recommend them both — SaiSuke calendar and Sync in a Blink for contacts. I am sure Google will soon offer their own iPhone synchronization soon.
If this all sounds complicated — it is. I have spent many hours getting to this point but I am a happy camper. More importantly, I am confident it will get better and better and I am almost no longer chained to my PC. Almost everything is in the clouds!
Update June 10, 2013 : MobileMe service ceased as of June 30, 2012. You may read more about this here.