We’re now in very rapid transition to storage and use of most of our files/documents incl music, photos and videos in the cloud without downloading. Files/documents/music/photos/videos won’t be stored or used on our computers, phones, pads any more.

Within three years, also most of our applications will also be used from the cloud. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are already moving strongly in that direction.

Haven’t you wondered why HP dumped $500 million worth of TouchPads? Devices that big/heavy will be outmoded within two years!

All we’ll have down here will be input and output. Both are still challenges- but look at this six-year old idea of goggles which both display the “computer screen” to the wearer and track his eyeballs for input to the computer: http://ccn.dartmouth.edu/wiki/index.php/Goggle_System
Also: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=8952e969b56e8aa9b688919cc83af5c7

We have the capability now to use all such files from the web.
We can backup all that to a different cloud drive storage system

My gmail, contacts, calendar, documents are in Google’s cloud. They are never downloaded or stored on any computer. (Documents are limited now to the 98% of our documents which are simple and reasonably-sized because of the limitations of Google’s present simple cloud applications, and because of up/download speed limitations. I use JungleDisk for more complex documents, and my Jungle Disk is backed up to iDrive.)

But— the “Google Backup” issue is in the “down” direction– we need to backup the cloud stuff DOWN HERE terrestrially. AlQaida continues to try to take our internet down, and it’s only a matter of time until either they do it, or we make it all so interdependent that a small glitch takes the whole thing down- remember the last east coast domino power outage- one tree branch in Wisconsin! We’d better have backup down here so we can get our personal lives and businesses up and going again “on the ground” but moreso when the internet gets back up.

If you remove photos & videos from the mix of data files to backup, that could reduce a lot of backup needs for many types of consumers.

I’m still a big fan of rsync and compression of the blocks before they are transmitted (to save transmission time on some type of files), but many don’t seem to offer either type of backup features.

Andy, CloudBerry Lab team