One very minor epiphany to come from the exercise of backing up my PC of the last two years before a brute-force upgrade to Ubuntu (the "Jaunty Jackelope" flavor), mainly because the process may very well trash the already borked installation.
The last time I had to do this sort of thing in any serious form, the term "cloud computing" had barely hit my radar, and then only in a hand-wavy, pie-in-the-sky-a-la-mode kind of sense. I'm still waiting to be convinced that it will be half of what its proponents claim, but it only now occurs to me what a sea-change it would represent. Currently, my backup "process" is still more or less glorified sneakernetting with flash drives and the kludgey misuse of an external hard drive that clearly resents the Linux cooties with which I'm infecting--or innoculating, depending on your point of view--it. But, saving file sizes, it's no different from the boxes of floppies that are (almost impossibly) holding out like Hiroo Onoda under the bed in the "guest room" that doubles as my office.
But to me, the whole point of treating the "cloud" as one giant data-attic is not so much that whatever bytes you consider important--or at least did when you uploaded them--as it is a matter of making the hardware more irrelevant. In other words, the semantic link between your computer and what it holds is severed.
For an old-schooler like me, at least, that's quite a reversal. At one time--namely the tail of the 1980s and 1990s--my digital life could fit on a couple of 5.25" floppies. Like other aspects of post-college life, however, it became to easy to leave that collegiate (cough) "nomadism" behind and settle down. This is when personal computers were still quite an investment...particularly for a distinctly unemployable Liberal Arts major. And even floppies weren't exactly disposable back in the day. Thus the hardware and the data were basically synonymous. If your computer was whacked, you were pretty much out of luck.
That, I believe, led to a certain fetishization of PCs, particularly during the early to early-middle part of the PC era. While I doubt that we'll ever see the renaissance of the "thin client," I do think that we'll see the hardware become less relevant to computing in the generic sense. (Specialized gadgets will probably be chased into obsolesence even more quickly, which might offset the extra commoditization for chip manufacturers--although I'm guessing it won't be by that much.)
But our attitude toward computers--meaning the ones we actively use in our workaday lives--will definitely never be the same.
