Changing to hosted solutions

Posted 26 October 2006

For more than 10 years, I’ve arranged my computing around a single notebook PC that went with me everywhere. With docks, monitors, and keyboards at home and in the office, this was a pretty good solution. It avoided having to install software on multiple systems, and it ensured that I had everything I needed wherever I was.

This strategy began to fall apart for me largely because of my photo collection. With about 60,000 photos, I can’t fit them all on any notebook disk drive. For about a year, I carried an external drive with my notebook. Then it was two external drives. And then one of them died. I had everything backed up, but this drove home the fragility of this solution. Plus I wanted a higher performance system than a notebook can provide for working with large images, especially panoramas, and I wanted a system that my family could use to access all the photos even if I’m traveling with my notebook PC.

Going out on my own also added another set of issues and opportunities. Now that I’m freed from the dictates of corporate IT, I no longer need to use the accursed Outlook calendar, and I can craft my own IT solutions.

So I decide to move as much as I could to hosted solutions, so my data lived independently of any of my computers. I’ll chronicle this effort in a series of follow-up posts.