So my work laptop BSOD'd on me. Not Windows - it was the hard drive. This is actually the third work hard drive to die in the past two years. I also had a personal PC hard drive fail on me two years ago. Add that up and I've now had 5 - that's right - five hard drives die on me in the last two years.
I don't exactly baby my laptops, but I do use them long, hard hours. Often times 12+ hours a day, every day, more or less. My laptops do travel with me everywhere and I'm sure they have the same kind of typical insults other hard drives encounter in laptop form factors.
But that many failures would be enough to devastate most people - myself included, up until a couple years ago.
Now, though, I more or less live in a cloud.
- My personal and work mail is web-based.
- My most imporant documents are all in Google Docs and Spreadsheets
- My digital photos are all uploaded to Google's Picasaweb
- My personal laptop is backed up by Mozy online automatically every day
- My work laptop is backed up to a server automatically every day
It's nice to know that ... should my hard drive die on whatever machine I'm on ... I can drop my Freespire Linux Live CD in, connect to the web and get going again in just a couple minutes.
In fact, the main thing that lives offline is my Firefox configuration - which I keep on a USB drive.
Freespire, it turns out, is really nice. Easy to set up and use. I'm pretty amazed at how well everything works - and it's fast. Well, except for certain javascript apps in Firefox. Yikes - really, really slow.
It will be nice when I can simply go with a solid state flash RAM hard drive to boot my OS and then simply connect to the cloud. Speed, energy efficiency, battery life and durability should improve, all without sacrificing access to data.
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