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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
But if I'm going to have secondary/tertiary backups by necessity, then why shouldn't my primary laptop carry its share of the burden?
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Why not indeed? But the fact that the laptop
could carry the burden in itself doesn't obviate cloud computing as a viable alternative, which is what is under discussion here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
And before you assert that 32/64GB and an SD are enough for any reasonable human being, see below.
1. It seems to me that you forfeit your position the moment you insist you know how much storage an individual needs -- let alone when the amount you advocate is considerably less than any other company would ask users to tolerate. You might have valid ideas about the impracticality of indiscriminate data storage or adopting a more zen-like lifestyle, but when it comes to other people and their usage, that's not your (or Google's) call to make. I mentioned the person at the writer's retreat specifically because she told me she needed an even larger drive than her 200GB internal.
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You're putting words into my mouth. The local storage in question was specifically for your example of someone going away on retreat, in other words an activity outside of one's normal routine.
I noted that an external hard drive was an option above. Indeed your writer friend said that she'd need something larger than the 200 GB in her own laptop. Therefore her needs could be satisfied with an external USB drive of the appropriate size, regardless of whether she was on a Chromebook, a Windows Ultrabook, or a MacBook Air.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
2. The point, of course, is immediate access when one is away from one's various backup media. Having the cloud as a failsafe or additional redundancy is convenient and practical. Depending on it as one's primary source is asking to be entirely dependent on internet access at every moment of use. For those who are less spartan than you or the Pixel user you forecast, cloud-primary storage can be quite impractical in a world in which constant access is still theoretical.
Note the blackouts in NYC which I've just mentioned -- cell phone and internet access was gone even longer than electricity. We live in a time of disasters natural and otherwise, and to expect always to be connected, or that cloud storage is fixed, is asking to be disappointed.
I don't know about you, Graham, but when it comes to daily existence, I think I'm well covered in the disappointment department.
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This last is a genuine concern, of course, but it's one of weighing up risk.
If you are using a Chromebook then your email will be available offline, as will any documents you've taken offline, which are likely to be the ones you most need. You'll probably also have access to some offline entertainment.
If you are in the habit of taking a local backup - as you should be regardless of whether your primary machine is a local one or a cloud one - then you will also have access to that.
If you have a smartphone - and given the price of this I suspect most owners will have one - then you have two different internet providers. If your home or work connection goes down then you can tether to your phone.
So, the real issue is when there is some sort of serious outage, such as the blackouts in NYC. While the electricity is out then neither type of machine is much use, so you're talking about the relatively short period when electricity is back up but internet and mobile connectivity is not.
This is a rare event. I would look at that risk and find it acceptable.
Clearly a Chromebook is not intended for someone living in a rural location with intermittent connectivity, but for those who live somewhere with reasonable internet access, so you could very reasonably offset the rare occasions when some major disaster took down the bandwidth against the times you'd spend maintaining your 'traditional' machine.
I have spent the last four and a half hours trying to fix my Father's PC which is riddled with malware and unnecessary startup programs. I can remember countless times both at home and work when PC problems have prevented me from working for a few hours.
Chromebooks may, on occasion, give you a problem because the file you need is in the cloud and not currently accessible. It's a different sort of problem to those you get with traditional PCs. I suspect it will happen less often.
Graham