Living in the cloud

My hard-drive crashed last Saturday, which kind of pissed me off as I was planning on spending Sunday playing online with one of my mates. So I spent Sunday and Monday formatting and re-installing everything.

To my surprise: I didn’t actually loose anything. I hadn’t realised how much of my data actually lives on the cloud.

It turns out 100% of my data lives “up there”.

Over the years I guess I’ve been slowly migrating without noticing the full extent.

This is the list of services I currently use:

• Google Chrome (I keep my bookmarks and history synced across devices using my Google account)
• Steam (I use this to purchase games online, I can re-install every game I bought on the platform on a new PC in less than a day)
• Github (I host all my projects here, including personal projects on private repos. Yeah, I could use bitbucket as well I guess)
• Spotify (Online music streaming service. I haven’t downloaded iTunes nor have I accessed Grooveshark in a couple of years)
• Dropbox (I did quite a few referrals and I got bumped up to 56GB of space. Now I store all my photos, videos and music on Dropbox)
• Google Drive (Why not just use Dropbox? Well… I find Google Drive convenient for documents, so I use it for all my office-related documents)

And that is how I successfully moved everything to the cloud. Hard-drive crash? No problem. Format, re-install, wait for downloads to complete, and you’re good to go.

If you have used other cloud services in the past that you think I should add to my list of must-haves, please let me know in the comment section below.