Quote:
Originally Posted by
Suddenly Newton 
A very relevant question indeed. I've owned computers long enough to realize that the technology is disposable, but your records & data last potentially forever. After upgrading many times over the years, I realized that it was rather stupid to store all of your data on a computer, particularly in the days before Time Machine made backing up trivial. A few years ago, I got a RAID 5 NAS, and migrated all of my long-term Mac & PC data there. This was a step in the right direction (except the Linux-based NAS uses some funky drive format that doesn't like some of HFS+ pathnames). But I've already had to replace one of the drives after a few years, and I'm worried that eventually, I won't be able to buy Parallel ATA drives at some point in the future, making my RAID array unserviceable. What to do? Besides stocking up on spare PATA drives? Then it hit me: with cable modems and FIOS speeds reaching 15Mbps+, it made sense to use cloud storage. Of course, you have to trust your cloud vendor not to drop the ball on backing up your data & keeping it secure forever (or until you cancel the service). So I predict that's where things will go for many who have access to fast broadband.
The MacBook Air is a step in that direction. I just got one (woo hoo!) and the SSD drive isn't big enough for all my iTunes music & HD video files, so I'm keeping those on my MBP, which I had upgraded to 640GB a few months ago. I'm going to use iDisk to sync files between the two. I also read somewhere that you could put all of you iTunes data on a network share, like a USB drive attached to an Airport Extreme. I'll be looking into that. I plan to use a mirrored (RAID 1) USB drive for that, as it wouldn't be included in Time Machine backups.
It is amazing the number of people that hoard their data. And many, if not most, that don't have a backup plan.
But then, all we have to do is visit our bedrooms, our basements, our offices or our cars.
Right off, let it be clear, that if we have a need to have our entire music, video or photo library on our computers, there are legitimate and rational reasons to keep it as handy as possible. For
most however, much of what is there now is basically useless, i.e., rarely if ever used.
And why not test to see if we really need all that space for nothing.
Method: Create and save a Smart Folder(s), adding 'Used Dates' is 'within', e.g., 30, 60 or 90 days, and 'Kind' is '
Application'
Most of us would be extremely surprised at the number of applications we have installed, and more enlightening, the relatively smaller number we actually use routinely. For the MacBook Air, I wouldn't be running Adobe CS and excluding that suite alone would save me nearly 5 GBs of space.
Now, create another Smart Folder(s) for Document, music, movies, etc? Do we need all those versions. More important, do we need all of them outside of our offices or homes and subject to loss, thievery or carelessness?
Then create a Smart Folder of everything that we really need and use. We would be amazed how really small it is.
As you have pointed out, there are a number of ways to access your data other than keeping it all within arms length. And, if anybody can offer a newer and more viable solution, it will most likely come from Apple. I have not witnessed anything that would lead me to believe that it would not be secure as possible, or overly costly.
Let's look at it another way. My home is over 3200 sq ft. My office is 200. Our cottage is only 900. My hotel rooms are seldom over 150. Our home contains everything. My office, current projects. Our cottage, the necessities. My hotel room, a bed/TV/bathroom. All, to my wife's chagrin have internet. But basically everything I need for the moment.
I would like to add, we have contemplated on building a larger cottage. But then, we realized that my relatives and friends(?), let alone my wife's, would want to be there all the time. So we put the plans in a Smart Folder so to speak.
