DD# 72- Why the Cloud works for Business Travelers

Our work took us up to Alaska the first week of December, always a trip that I look forward to. Some people call it crazy, but I enjoy Alaska in the winter as much as in the summer.  One reason is that only Alaskans are there this time of year, as all the tourists have gone home or elsewhere. For instance, the population of Juneau physically doubles when five cruise ships are in, and all those visitors are packed into a downtown area never intended to fit that many people at once. Not to mention that stark, beauty of the magnificent, dichromatic blue and white landscape. But I digress.
I no longer save much data to my laptop. It’s much more efficient for us to save nearly all our files out to the Cloud, (at our company, Google Drive). There are many reasons, including real-time file collaboration, data synchronization, and one other big one – if you lose your laptop, you don’t lose your data! And yes, some fine. upstanding citizen of Alaska’s largest city benefited from my having left my business backpack in the car in plain sight, following a long day of P6 training for Cruz Construction up in Palmer. So despite losing my #1 main machine that I rely on to do my day job, all I’m out data-wise is a few odds and ends and the time to reload program files. Because I save everything important up to the cloud, (which syncs with my laptop all day long), no crucial data was lost. Even despite my having worked with four different companies on important projects, in the four days prior to the theft.
That’s not to say it’s perfect. I doubt I’ll ever see a few hundred pictures that I saved to Picasa a couple years ago, which became Google+ and that I have no idea what happened to when my paid subscription expired.  That time I lost my wallet and had to have my credit cards replaced, so the extra paid Google picture storage account expired… but that’s way better than having lost crucial client data due to the recent theft of my laptop. I bought a new one, installed Google Drive, and all my files are right where I left them.  Even though my laptop isn’t.  Chalk up one for the cloud.