It used to be that pretty much my entire life was on my computer. If my house/apartment/dorm burned down, I could lose everything — bookmarks, web development files, documents, graphics, software, photos, music. I invested heavily in storage, starting with endless stacks of floppies, then zip discs, burned CDs, and finally burned DVDs and external hard drives. Data loss was absurdly common, even so. I can remember several times losing entire hard drives’ worth of data when a computer crashed (or I formatted the wrong drive when reinstalling Windows).
So it’s funny to realize that I don’t think about that at all anymore. Losing a computer would be an annoyance (an admittedly expensive one), but I wouldn’t suffer any real data loss. My bookmarks are synced online. My photos are on flickr. My websites automatically send a database dump to gmail on a weekly basis. My email and documents are in google. My feed reader is online. My web development files are all stored in a Dropbox account or in a version control system like Github. In fact, just about the only files that I don’t already store online are my MP3s, but even they are distributed across various computers, iPods and iPhones, so losing a single computer wouldn’t really cause any serious losses. If I lost my home computer, I would lose about three months of photos, but only because I’m lazy and keep forgetting to upload the latest ones to Flickr.
The whole thing reminds me of this illustration comparing a 2000 iMac to a 2010 iPhone. In ten years, we’ve gone from my entirely livelihood being physically attached to a single computer to nearly everything being stored online, and any given computer is just the local copies of those files.
