I've been sceptical of cloud computing, and to an extent even cloud storage, simply because of the well-publicized outages experienced by the 8,000 lb. gorillas in that spaced (Google, Amazon). If I had to be responsible (horrors!) for any start-uppity programmers other than myself, it would still be worth the bling and nuisance of hosting my own data/applications.
But, between them, my husband and @CyberCowboy demonstrated the usefulness of a "freemium" service called Dropbox. While I carry the critical (albeit periodical) backups on a couple USB drives, files that need to be backed up daily--meaning every day that I change them) are finding their way into the Dropbox folder.
But in the last couple of days, that's taken on a slightly different twist. I have any number of slips of paper or printed copies of snippets of code that I've found useful once in awhile. Not often enough, mind you, for them to be hard-wired into my brain. That's where DropBox comes in. Code snippets that would normally be slipped inside textbooks are being typed into descriptively named text files and synched up into the cloud.
Maybe someday I'll get fancy enough to write an upload application that supports all sort of tagging and search algorithms, but for the time being, this has the potential to be a huge time-saver. Someday maybe network latencies and uptime histories will hit a threshold where allocating hard drive space to workaday applications like word-processors, spreadsheets, photo editors, code development environments, etc. will become something that hobbiests and tinkerers do. Me, I can't hold my breath for that long.
But in the meantime, I'm rather pleased with the more modest use I've found for a convenient (and, at my level, free) cloud application. If the service crashes, there's still the flash drive--and, of course the omniscience of Google.
