Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

However unlike in the past when such an event would have been catastrophic if you did not maintain backups (even if you did, recovering would be a time consuming), this time round oddly, I took it by my stride. My Time Machine backup is more than 50 days old, however all my crucial data is already in the cloud! I lost no personal data. All my documents, code etc.. is in Dropbox. All my pictures are in MobileME and all my mail, contacts, calendar is centralised to my Google Apps email address. 

So I went to the Apple store and bought a new machine (17'' MBP) and in no time I was back up and running. Its then that I realised that cloud computing has killed the "Personal Computer". Computers now are vessels of your data, you use them to create/consume but you are not tied to them if you extensively use cloud computing systems. Because I was able to recover from the crash so quickly, I'm reconsidering if I have to maintain a Time Machine backup at all. 

The only thing that took some time, and a time machine backup would solve is the installation of applications. However, if the world moves towards cloud based application  delivery (as all indications suggest) then even the installation of applications would be eliminated. In that case, all you need to do is have access to a computer, any computer, and your good to go.