I blew out the harddrive on my MacBook Pro yesterday during a meeting. Kaput. Dead. Nada. After working with Apple Support for a couple of hours I took it to the Apple store and they sent away for a new harddrive. I'll be up and running this afternoon thanks to Apple and Time Machine.
However the best thing about this experience is that it reaffirms my love of the cloud. Besides the time I spent directly working with Apple, I didn't miss a beat. I fired up another laptop running Ubuntu and I was back to work in no time.
Here's what makes working in the cloud so enjoyable...
Email - Since we use Google Apps for the Appirio domain all of my mail is stored in the cloud. I didn't have to reinstall Office, recover my PST file or restore a backup. All of my mail was instantly accessible.
Documents - We run all of our projects on Google Apps so I didn't lose any info on the three projects on which I am currently working. All of the docs and spreadsheets that I needed were instantly accessible with the latest versions. Again, no software to install or backup files to locate.
Development Environment - Development with Salesforce.com in the cloud is a snap. I installed Eclipse and then the Force.com IDE plugin in a matter of minutes. I simply created a new Force.com project which pulls down all of the source code from the server. I'm back to work! I could have just as easily used the browser to develop but I prefer Eclipse.
Notes - I'm working on a new Salesforce.com book with Wes Nolte and initially thought that I had lost some of my notes pertaining to it. Then I remembered that I have been using Evernote for notes and DropBox for chapters and working materials. Both services have a web interface, iPhone apps and desktop apps for Ubuntu (not sure about Evernote?) so accessing these files was a piece of cake.
Passwords - One of the things I was concerned about was the passwords to all of my websites. Luckily I started using LastPass recently so I just needed to install the LastPass Firefox plugin and log into my account.
Bookmarks - I store all of my bookmarks at delicious so I had instant access from any computer.
Music - Courtesy of Pandora and Grooveshark.
