The breaking of a laptop shows just how much of my life is stored online
There's an episode of Sex and the City, entitled My Motherboard, My Self, in which Carrie Bradshaw's laptop crashes, destroying every line of half-tortured, half-cute prose she's ever written. The event, not unlike many in the hit HBO series, is a soul-searching one. By the end of the programme she has admitted that even independent women such as herself can't always manage alone, and has given her boyfriend the keys to her flat. And he has bought her a Zip drive.
It's been a long time since I put away my Mac PowerBook G3 and stopped pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw. Yet last week, I couldn't help but recall the episode in question. As I stared at my IBM ThinkPad, which I had just retrieved from a deep pool of filthy water that had been expelled by a rogue air-conditioning system at a hotel in Buenos Aires, the frightening realisation that I wasn't that dissimilar from the ditzy sex columnist began to run through me like a chill.
You see, I had always meant to back up my files. I'd even got close to doing it at one stage, but had been distracted into troubleshooting my DVD drive. The truth was, I had never, in my one-year relationship with that beautiful, now perished machine, backed up my files. I'm supposed to be tech-savvy. Even my mother backs up her files. I had committed the first faux pas of modern computing. And now all my files were gone.
My Motherboard, My Self was first aired in 2001. And as I'm coming to realise, wandering through this life temporarily bereft of a laptop, a lot has changed since then. Most of the data that's precious to me wasn't on my laptop at all. Because most of it is stored online.
All my emails are stored on my Gmail account, which I access through the web. My photo album is on the photo-sharing site Flickr. My work contacts are stored in Highrise, a new application by the hip project management software team 37signals. Even my web bookmarks are stored on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. I haven't quite got into using online office applications, or storing documents on shared sites such as Google Docs or DropSend. But then most of what I write gets published on the web anyway.
This machine was my bread and butter. I wrote on it, I ran the Open Rights Group using it, yet now it is gone, I barely miss it. It turns out that my laptop was just, as they say in the jargon, a "thin client" - a practically content-free entry point to a network within which my digital life is stored.
Network storage may not be glamorous, but this week it helped me keep my cool. And as Carrie Bradshaw might have observed, perhaps while playing coyly with her hair in front of her new G3 PowerBook in the late 1990s, sometimes the least glamorous things in life turn out to be the ones that let us live in style.
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