Dead Laptop

So, a couple nights ago, my laptop died.  Now, as far as my Hugo stuff goes, that isn't extremely dire.  First off, I was pretty good about uploading Roodylib and other extension stuff to my bitbucket account as I worked on it, so, at most, the bitbucket version might be missing a day or two's amount of work.  Also, I backed up all of my game work in progress code before a trip some months ago, and both fortunately and unfortunately, I've been so bad about working on my games in progress the last several months that there isn't probably a whole lot changed between what-I-most-recently-had and what-I-have-backed-up (I did recently have my games open and did a whole lot of code-cleaning and optimizing, but no real new content was added).

Beyond that, I'm pretty sure the hard drive in my defunct laptop is ok, so I should be able to retrieve all of my old data once I get an external dock or something.  Between that and the fact that I was in a midsummer coding slump anyhow, I'm not in any real hurry to work on anything in the near future.

Mainly, I'm just kicking myself for not making better use of today's free cloudspace so I had more of my data still at my fingerprints.

As far as music goes, while I don't have my ~100 GB mp3 collection uploaded anywhere, all of my purchased-from-Amazon mp3s are always available in the Amazon Cloud Player (plus the extra 240 songs I could fit into my remaining free space).  My Amazon music might make up for a fraction of my overall collection, but it's still 4000 some songs so it's not shabby, either.  Plus, some of my music is on last.fm, too, so I can just sign into that and do the playlist where it only plays songs it has already played previously in my music library. Lastly, spotify can be good for individual album listening.

My bought games can all be re-downloaded, but I have to say that I'm especially glad that Steam has added cloud saving.  It is really nice that I don't have to restart on the few Steam games I really cared about.

My coding projects are mostly in various states of "backed-up".  The most backed up projects I have are the ones that I share with Robb Sherwin and are repo'd.  It's a really nice thing that with a repository, you always know you have the working copy of something.  On the other hand, I'm currently borrowing time on somebody else's laptop, so I'm not sure if I'm actually going to install repo software on it.

Robb Sherwin also set me up with a linode server account, so maybe I should have kept all of my stuff on there.  Also, maybe I could just bitbucket all of my game code, besides just library stuff.

There's also just being better about backing up to USB devices and stuff, but that's such an easy thing to fall out of habit with.  Just the same, I wish I had been better about stocking a USB stick with as many of my favorite apps that support running from portable drives.

I'll also say that I was happily surprised that since I had used the multiple-user feature in Chrome on my dead laptop, when I added accounts to this temporary one, all of my bookmarks and passwords were instantly accessible.  Besides that, of course, all of my Google Docs stuff is already all save in the cloud.  On my old laptop, I pretty much used Chrome for just e-mail and productivity stuff (Google Docs, Google Tasks, etc.), but with how easy it is to have your stuff follow you everywhere, maybe I'll get in the habit of using it for more things.

I can understand why some people are distrustful of the cloud and warn people to not put all of their eggs in that basket. I agree with that, too, but there are still plenty of ways of using it to your advantage.  I'll try to be smarter about it in the future.