Everybody’s talking about “the cloud” these days.
Cloud computing is the reason some Apple laptops only come with a 250 GB hard drive. It’s also why Google, Apple, and Amazon are fighting over who gets to host your music library.
And it’s where you’ll eventually end up storing your most precious data – probably.
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You might be moving data to the cloud to free up space on your local hard drive. Or maybe you just want to make your music and photos accessible from all your devices. Either way, migrating so many files to a new location can seem daunting.
But guess what? It’s not all that hard.
In fact, there are already several kinds of data you can move to the cloud today with minimal effort. Here are three of them:
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1. Documents
Nearly everybody has loads of Word files, PDF’s, and spreadsheets taking up space on their hard drives. Needless to say, if you’re ready to declutter your data a little bit, you’re in good company.
Thankfully, Google Docs has been around long enough that you might even call it a mature technology. Simply put, it’s an application that lets you create and store all kinds of documents securely in the cloud. If you want, you can even export each one to a Word document, PDF, or other file type.
Google Docs also lets you invite others to edit a document, which makes it a great alternative to sending attachments back and forth. And when you have a large file transfer, you won’t have to worry about your email client saying your message is too big to send.
2. Music
This year’s introduction of Amazon’s Cloud Player means everybody can finally get rid of those external drives they purchased to store their tunes. Sure, the service is only free up to 5GB, but most people will probably find it more affordable than the up-front cost of an external drive.
Its biggest draw, of course, is the ability to listen to your music on any device without moving files around – unless, of course, you have an iPhone. Amazon Cloud Player will work on your computer and your Android smartphone, but not on Apple iOS devices.
Apple users need not fear, however. Steve Jobs & Co. are set to release iCloud later this year. It’s meant to compete with Amazon’s service, and rumor has it you can use it for photos, too.
3. Backups
Want to liberate yourself from another external drive? Services like Rackspace and Amazon S3 let you back up all your data to the cloud – securely.
You can even set the service to backup only certain files and schedule backups for as often as you like. All backing up occurs in the background, so you’ll never even notice it’s happening.
In 2017, there’s little excuse to not keep at least some of your data in the cloud. After all, it’s getting easier to do so. Although these three examples are just the tip of the iceberg, trying any of them should help you get the hang of this whole “cloud” thing.
