Insight | Systems to Manage Your Digital Life

Being a fan of the Google Ideal, I am looking forward to the day that my computer does not have a hard drive.

[There is a security risk to storing your entire life online, but it’s minimal. At the end of the day, if someone is hell-bent of hacking your life and stealing all your information, they are going to do it regardless of where your files are stored.]

Is it productive and cost effective to be 100% web-based?

The short answer to the question above is, NO, it is not productive or cost effective to be 100% web based; especially if you have adopted the Google Methodology. Almost every online hard drive and storage system I have reviewed uses a files and folders system which is an antiquated way to store your information.

What is the Google Methodology?

The new skool and vastly improved method offered by Google is to rely on Google’s search capabilities and store all your files in one folder [or a handful]. When you need to find a file, you simply perform a search using the file’s name, type, a string of text found within the document; or a combination of these parameters. It’s pretty mindboggling at first. It took me several months to truly adopt this new skool method of storing and recalling information. Now that I have made the switch, I save time both storing and finding my information, since I am not fumbling around within folders to find a file. I simply use my Google Desktop to locate the file(s) quickly and easily. In reflection, my previous reliance on a folder system was rooted in my need to organize my files so I wouldn’t lose any information. I realize that implicit in losing something is needing it; which means I would recall something about the file I desired to locate. I then type that information into Google Desktop and Voila [like magic my file and ones related to it are there].

“Google Desktop makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. It’s a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed, and more. By making your computer searchable, Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks.” Excerpt from the Google Desktop website.

As much as I would like it to, Google Desktop does not liberate me from the shackles of my personal hard drive. Ironically, it does quite the opposite and binds me to it.

If you do a search for “online hard drive” you will quickly see that there are a lot of companies competing to be your provider. Unfortunately, very few of them are any good, and even fewer are built to last. Who wants to store their data with a company that is destined to go under?

While my current data storage and recall protocol is not centralized, I believe it provides me with the best of both worlds. At present, I consider it to be the optimal balance between relying on my personal hard drive and a web-based one. I will be able to achieve my ultimate goal when Google finally launches its web based hard drive [I have no idea what is taking them so long].

Currently, I use two personal hard drives, the one that is in my laptop and an external one. Every two days, I back-up my laptop hard drive to the external one. Both jiveSYSTEMS and Ortonomous daily operations go through our Google Apps accounts: emails, documents, and spreadsheets. As per my article “Ascension via Compartmental Refinement Theory,” we identify repetitive tasks and house them within Infusionsoft (our automated marketing and CRM system) when appropriate. Google Apps is 100% web based. We also store all our PDF’s in our Google Apps accounts, i.e. Legal Documents. Google Apps frees us from both the even rising cost and inefficiencies of Microsoft’s email client Outlook, and Office Suite. Google Apps is simply Google’s offerings packaged for companies. You can get access to all their services without a Google Apps account; just go to Google.com and sign-up for Gmail account and then add Gdoc, GCal, and other services to it.

My laptop hard drive, the one that I back-up to my external hard drive, is mostly composed of music and video files [large files]. This is because, like I mentioned earlier, Google hasn’t launched its online hard drive, and therefore only houses emails, documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files. In their defense, even the fastest broadband internet connections make storing and using large files online a time sapping nuisance.

What about a web based hard drive?

The jury is still out. I have tested over fifteen providers [I stopped counting several months ago], and I am yet to find a substitute to a local hard drive. However, three companies are on my radar, right now: Box.net, LiveDrive.com, or GetDropBox.

Box.net is a force to be reckoned with in the online storage business. They have an extremely intuitive interface and versatile feature array focused around collaboration and permission based access. Unfortunately, Box.net provides their wonderful service at a significant cost. For a small business user, like me, they charge $15 / user/ month with only 15GB of storage space. LiveDrive.com on-the-other-hand offers unlimited storage for an annual fee of just under $130; granted they are still new and relatively untested. That being said, their marketing and current features look very promising. GetDropBox is a super clean interface. Their service is perfect of individuals or teams.

At the end of the day you have two choices:

1. Use your local hard drive for large files and back it up regularly, if you are really fancy get RAID or a Drobo Drive [they offer automated redundancy and recovery of your information by storing it on multiple hard-drives at the same time]. Then use Google’s web based office suite to manage your emails, documents, and calendar, and more…
2. Adopt the usage of Box.net, LiveDrive, or GetDropBox. You can then just use your local hard drive to run your operating system; or, find a balance between using an online hard drive for important files and collaboration, and local system for your archives and/or large files.

When all is said and done, unless it’s Google’s online hard drive [which is yet to be launched], the solution you design is merely a stop gap [in my opinion]. My advice is to do a little testing. Storing critical data on a web-based hard drive can provide peace of mind and improve the efficiency of the collaborative process.

Other resources:

• Here is a list of the online hard drive and storage services I have reviewed: Fluxiom (looks promising also), Egnyte, DriveHQ, FlipDrive, FreeDrive, Mozy, OpenDrive, HugeDrive, ElephantDrive, IDrive, ShareFile, FilesAnywhere, and more…
• Here is a list of the web based office suites I have reviewed: Zoho, Web Office, OpenOffice, ThinkFree, HyperOffice, and others…

Do you have any thoughts, ideas, or strategies for managing your digital life?

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