Crash

What would the loss of your primary computer mean to you?

A couple of weeks ago I was at a client’s site. This client had a couple of old servers… So old, in fact, they were tan in color. Think about it… when was the last time you saw a *new* tan computer? Yep, they were that old. Twelve years old or more, judging by the hardware and software blend in these particular servers.  We were “virtualizing” these servers into a newer server they had purchased. This means that we were converting the old tan box computers into VMWare Virtual Servers.

The intricacies of that are beyond the scope of this article. This article is about what happened while the servers were being “virtualized”.

My laptop battery had been giving me issues. By “issues” I mean that it couldn’t hold more than about a 10 minute charge. This was not a critical deal, since I basically go from electric socket to electric socket in the course of my day. So, no big deal, just attach the "brick" (pseudo-tech slang for the brick-like power cord for a laptop) and keep moving.

Then my power brick started having issues. Subtle at first, the laptop would act as though it had been disconnected from power. Usually re-connecting the power did the trick. Soon, the brick disconnected for longer periods. The laptop would actually hibernate to deal with it.

Finally, in the middle of this conversion, the brick quit altogether. I certainly needed my laptop for this project, but mine was now completely dead. What to do?

Having little recourse, I drove down to a box store and first grabbed a replacement brick… $86.00. Hmm… More than I wanted to spend on a power brick, for sure. They are obtainable for around $35.00 online. But then, I did not have the luxury of waiting for an online purchase to be delivered. What to do?

I then started looking at replacement laptops. I stumbled across an Acer (Aspire 5532, for those taking notes) for about $380.00 ... $415.00 after tax. AMD 64bit processor, 3gb of RAM, 160gb of hard drive space. More than enough for me. But why is the cheapest laptop in the store the right option for me? Easy. I don’t need most of what the more expensive versions offer.  

The data on the old laptop was almost irrelevant. First, the data files of interest (word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, etc) are stored in my Dropbox.  I am a short sync away from replacing everything that was lost. Even my Droid has access to my Dropbox, and Windows Mac and Linux are all supported.

Second, my mail is hosted at Google Apps for Domains. I’m used to using the web interface, so I don’t require Outlook to get my work done. Anything that is sent to my email address is actually being held by Google. Why not? 25GB of space, and I just have to give them $50 per year per user. I now don't delete anything - using Google at its strength (search) to find things when I need to refer back. Anything with a web browser will get you to your email. Or, if you're a hard core Outlook junkie, there is a connector app that you can use.

Third, all of my bookmarks are being held at xmarks.com. This means that all of my bookmarks that I store on my laptop are actually backed up out on the web for sync with other computers or other web browsers on the same computer. It works great across platforms too... like from a PC to a Mac, or vice versa. 

Fourth, my personal passwords (and the occasional one for my client) are held at Lastpass.com. Lastpass stores your dozens of web passwords in a single easy to search set of groups. Need that obscure 9 character password with one number and one punctuation character and mixed case that you had to set for your home banking site? You don’t have to remember it. Lastpass will. There are agents for all of the major browsers, and works on Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as most smartphones.

Since all of the data I needed was neatly tucked away online, I didn’t have any hesitation about replacing my laptop. I shoved the old one out of the way, brought in the new one, installed Dropbox from the website and started from there. The few actual applications that I need (Putty, Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Security Essentials, Skype, PowerISO) are all updated and held elsewhere online.  It’s just a matter of downloading them.

The point is that there is a certain freedom that is really nice when you’re faced with hardware failure and you need to get up and running quickly. Check out your cloud based options. ;)