Moving everything into the cloud

February 27th, 2009 by Peter Glaeser | RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

I work on four different computers: the office desktop PC, a larger laptop for the couch, a small Asus netbook for travel (all running on Ubuntu Linux) and my home desktop PC running on Windows Vista. So you can see, the syncing of data has become a major issue to me.

To solve this issue I decided to move as many processes into the cloud as possible. Data that I have to be able to access are stored on a server that I also have physical access to. I do not save any files that I regularly work with on a specific client machine anymore. Having my files on a server also solves the issue of backups.

Now I’m in process of replacing as much client software as possible by browser-based services. For example, my calendar, tasks and contacts are stored on Mobical. My cell phone also synchronizes nicely with Mobical. Email are done through RoundCube, our company task and project management system is TaskFreak (both PHP/MySQL-based).

All these products re free, and you don’t have to sell your soul to Google in order to be able to use them. If you have anything else please feel free to share.

Seriously, cloud computing is the way to go. But all these app stores for mobile devices actually make us go back to the past instead of progress to the future. In the year 2009, why would I ever want to install a piece of software on a physical device that I have to replace at least every other year? That just doesn’t make sense to me. Buying software is old-school. Subscribing to a web/cloud-based service is the future.

  1. One Response to “Moving everything into the cloud”

  2. By Shawn Collins on Feb 27, 2009 | Reply

    Hey Peter -

    I have a similar setup to you with computers, and I’m making the move to the cloud, too.

    But I decided to sell my soul to Google.

    I got the Google Apps paid version of Gmail last summer and started pulling in my email accounts there as a redundancy to my PST file in Outlook.

    But recently, I decided I’d had enough of installing loads of software every time I get a new computer, and also dealing with the dread that Outlook could screw up any given day.

    It’s a little tough here and there to convert to Gmail from Outlook (the Tasks in Outlook have dictated my life for years), but the tools at Google, as well as third party apps like Remember the Milk have solved my problems.

    Good luck with your move. I’m putting Outlook to sleep tomorrow – right after I bring my inbox to zero emails.

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