To Cloud, or not to Cloud? That is the Question.

To Cloud or not to Cloud?

For a lot of geeks, this is a question that is preying on their minds. I am one of those geeks.

I'm fairly well integrated into the Cloud already; my fate was cemented when I bought a Google Phone. "What? You mean I can access all my mail and contacts and stuff from my phone and if I change it on my phone it will change my Google Contacts too? And my calendar and everything? I'M IN!" There are obvious benefits to having your phone info synced with the Cloud, like, never EVER again having to spend an entire evening alone with a bottle of wine and a DVD, manually inputting every single one of your contacts on your new phone...But if we take another step further, beyond phone contacts, calendars, etc., we start looking at things like personal documents, photos, videos and (potentially) application settings like for Firefox.

There are already choices out there to use...Google Docs was one of the first I heard about, Ubuntu One is a new Ubuntu service that is now standard with the latest release, and only just today, Dropbox was featured on Dork Adore (one of my favourite geek-centric blogs).

So it's easy to get into Cloud computing if you're of a mind to, but I still can't help feeling a bit uneasy about the whole thing. I don't know if it's my general mistrust of large organisations (I still feel a little niggly that Google has all my personal details in a file, regardless of what their privacy policy is), or whether it's influence from old Libertarian friends or my ex-military parents. I'm just not sure whether I would feel comfortable leaving someone else in charge of my documents.

Of course, there are a few big advantages to holding more information in the Cloud. For instance, I'm willing to bet that Google has a much more regimented and regular backing-up process than I have! And given that you could put almost all of your files now into a Cloud folder, it makes it easier to run small, lightweight computers like netbooks, because the only files you'd have to keep actually ON your computer would be your system files.

For me, at the moment, I'm undecided. I suspect, with all things, when it becomes a practical necessity to share more of my files with other computers, I will probably give it a go. But for now, I'll give it a miss, and just stick to syncing my contacts and calendar.