Saved By The Cloud

Now that my iPod Touch is off to Apple (it left yesterday on a trip to CA to be repaired), how have I been able to recover from its loss? What about all the data I worked with when using my Touch?

First of all, a brief aside: kudos to Apple. I logged onto their Web site on Thursday to request warranty service for my iPod Touch and the very next day, Friday, the packaging arrived for shipping it back to Apple. Very impressive turnaround so far.

My next aside is the fact that yesterday I visited my local AT&T store and ordered a white 16GB iPhone. So it’s a race between Apple and AT&T – which device will I receive first? I’m actually betting on Apple at this point, but who knows?

Now for the primary topic of this post: my iPod Touch has been the computer I used the most each day. In fact, I tell everyone that it’s a pocket computer that happens to play media. In addition to using it to play music, audio books, and videos, I used it to manage my daily finances, maintain contacts, keep appointments, maintain shopping lists, and manage all my tasks. I also used it to surf the Web, read RSS feeds, and handle email. Now that it’s gone, did all the data utilized by those functions disappear too?

Thankfully, not. You see most of the data I utilized with my Touch also resides in the “cloud”, that is, on Internet servers. So I did not lose a thing. For example, my tasks were managed on my iPod Touch using Appigo ToDo, a program which syncs with the wonderful Web-based task manager Remember The Milk (RTM). So all my tasks are still accessible to me through RTM’s web interface. My daily checkbook transactions were managed using the Web-based EditGrid spreadsheet system, which has a very nice iPhone/Touch interface. All my daily financial data  is likewise safe there. How about my RSS feeds? Well, I used Byline on my Touch, which is a Google Reader client. So all my RSS feed subscriptions are also safe and sound on Google’s servers. Shopping lists? Listingly has them…you getting the point?

Now this data protection is over and above that provided by backups. I backed up my iPod Touch at least once each day by syncing it with iTunes. However, without an iPod Touch I can’t get to this data! For the purpose of disaster recovery this backed up information is useless to me.

So, because of cloud-based services it’s very easy to access important data from multilple computing platforms (smartphone, iPod Touch, iPhone, PC, etc), but in addition you also get a safe repository for that information in case of a hardware catastrophy. Thank goodness for the cloud!