100% of our wonderful amdal readers are affected by Google everyday. Although this may sound like one of those non-profit charity commercials on TV, its totally true. I probably enter the Google Universe more than others, but I bet all of you have used Google for searching, looking up an address, finding an image, or even creating a spreadsheet. The latest from the big G is huge - Google Documents now supports uploading ANY file. This means you can backup your entire documents folder on your computer into the cloud - and access them anywhere. Let me show you what I'm talking about…In the past, Google Documents was really only good for creating word/excel-ish documents for sharing purposes. Even when it launched, I still found myself using Word and Excel for everything, and emailing them individually for sharing. The beauty of Google Docs is you can have ONE version of a document, and have it shared among a group of people. Very useful, but still not enough to get me hooked.
Now that Google's opened up their upload feature to all file types, you can literally replicate your files. There is a cap - 250mb - so you can't upload full movies or gigantically large powerpoint presentations, but 250mb should cover almost all of your documents. Since I purchased the 200GB of Google storage (with the free Eye-Fi memory card… remember), I have a ton of space to backup my documents/music/pictures. Your gmail account should already have around 7GB of Google storage to get you started, but if you want to do what I did, you can go here to buy more space.
Why is this a big deal? Well, recently my external hard drive failed. Not sure what happened exactly, but it was terrible. I was transferring my pictures/documents/music/movies from one computer to another, but didn't stop to think that once I transferred and deleted the original files, the only place they existed was on my external drive. When that crashed, I thought I lost everything (luckily for me, I'm a nerd and figured out how to get it back) - but the main takeaway was that I need to get my documents backed up in the cloud. Google's storage is secure and safe - everything is replicated so you don't have to worry about losing anything due to hardware breaking. Now that Google Docs has the ability to upload all my files, I'm going all-in, and I really suggest you do the same.
Note: I've mentioned Dropbox before, and I still think Dropbox is a great companion to having your files within Google storage. Since Dropbox syncs a folder on your computer (allowing you to access your files when offline), I would still use Dropbox for the files you access most often. Dropbox's free 2GB of storage should be enough to cover you. For everything else - get it off your risky hard drive and into the cloud!
