Cloud document storage as backup

By Nick Hortovanyi

I was listening to Cote's IT Management Podcast #34, through iTunes. Cote was talking about storage of documents in the cloud as a backup. It sounds like a great idea but in reality the size of the remote service is pretty small in comparison to the size of most people's current collection.

Thus for people to use it they have to work out which documents have priority over other documents.  I'm not sure about you, but for me that's a task that takes time. If its not something that I can set and forget, I'm one that is not likely to remember to add it to my expanding lists of todos.

So I'm in ageement with Cote that for it to be usefull, its got to be easy to use and do the complete job.

Which leads me onto Mobile Me. I've got now in my Finder on my Mac Book Pro an iDisk with  9.99 GB available. I've set up a little website with iWeb (which is part of iLife '09) but its using a fraction of the space.

What to do with the rest of the space? After all I have paid for the Mobile Me service with 10 GB!

I'm using an Apple Time Capsule and the built in Time Machine to back up my entire machine. Its a no brainer and the Time Capsule has more storage then my actual Mac Book Pro. It also acts as my WiFi base station. As such, this only works when I'm connected to my local network.  

One of the major benefits of cloud storage, is that if that something happens that destroys your physical equipment you have a backup of it some where else. Forgetting the fact that I don't have a monthly allowance on my current ADSL2 plan, that could back up my entire machine, I'm sure that the content that is important to me could be. If only I didn't have to remember to do it!