A life on the cloud

I was always someone who had everything on his laptop. Email and files would all be on my laptop at all times. I took backups using Apple’s Time Machine and had another Carbon Copy Cloner copy. I used to take two backups almost daily! 

The reason for this was that I used POP for my email and I had set it up so that my mail client (Apple Mail) would delete the copy of the email from the server. If anything happened to my laptop which caused me to lose my data, I would be stranded without my email forever! 

I had this bad experience at one point when both my hard disks crashed and the only copy of all my mail and files was on my laptop. I became paranoid after this incident.

Recently, I decided to put an end to this dependency on hard disks once and for all. I painstakingly moved all my email to IMAP. I had to create folders in the IMAP account and then drag and drop email from the corresponding POP folder to the IMAP folder. This was the worst part of the entire exercise.

Then came the files. I already had a Dropbox Plus account which gave me 1 TB of data storage on the cloud. I wasn’t using this enough. I took the big decision of moving all my files to Dropbox. I first spent some time cleaning up my files on the laptop. I removed a lot of files that were just lying there without being loved for years. I moved all of them to Trash. I also structured my folders better. Then, I finally moved everything to Dropbox from the laptop. 

There, I was done!

I recently moved to an iPad Pro 10.5” as my primary work computer. To get it all setup, I simply had to setup my Gmail account and my Dropbox account and then in Dropbox, I had to set all my files to “Make Available Offline”. Once this was completed, I was all set.

There are many advantages to this. I can practically work from any computer. I am not tied down to using my own. Even if my iPad goes down, I would not lose a single email or file. The only downside to this is the availability of the internet to sync. But this is not needed all the time since I always have the most recent copy on my iPad. Changes would get synced when the connectivity was restored.

I think moving to the cloud is a great change from the way I used to work. It is very efficient and safe. I don’t have to ever worry about losing any data or taking backups. A life on the cloud is a good thing!