Friendly advice

So it's happened again. A friend or acquaintance hits me up with a "Hey you're good with Computers right?" His problem was he was spamming all his friends both through email and various groups. "I don't get it, two of my accounts have been hacked in the last two months. My antivirus is up to date and says I'm clean." Now I share Jeff Atwoods views on antivirus, which is to say, they're never worth it and we should not be running as admins. However I can't expect everyone I know to know how to stop running as admin. So I'm not even going to go there. But this person also had a complaint that I used to have, but almost don't even think about anymore. "I have too much on this computer to wipe it and start over or upgrade to a new machine."

Now I advised him about brute-force hacks and pointed out how pass-phrases are better than passwords. Since Jeff Covers it pretty good right there, I'm not even going to go into it anymore. But instead lets look at the other issue. Users locking themselves into a particular machine because the upgrading would be too painful in that they may loose files.

As I said already, I used to have this complaint, but over the last 15 years, it has shrank to not even being a minor annoyance. What's changed? Well, at first it was removable hard-drives, then USB sticks that hold more documents and pictures than I can imagine, but lately it's thanks to services like DropBox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. Drop Box was kind of the pioneer of this, and even though space is limited, they are my favorite so far. But with a windows phone, I automatically had a  SkyDrive account set up. Which was nice when unexpectedly I bricked my first one by letting it hit the pavement with an excessive amount of force. I didn't have a back-up of the pictures I'd taken, and some of them I was going to miss. When I got my new phone, those pictures actually synced back on to my phone. I didn't know what happened at the time, but I sure was glad it happened. Interestingly enough, once I started to explore SkyDrive, I found some pictures also stored there from an old windows 6.5 phone. I'm not sure if I uploaded them and forgot or Microsoft did some sort of auto sync even back then (when it was called Mesh). Google Drive is the newest to me, so I can't say much about it yet, good or bad.

All of these services install a sync folder on your system. Anything you save there is also stored on the internet (I REFUSE to say "in the cloud." I will not refer to the might that is the internet by its symbol on a UML diagram, which was just a modern way of saying "Here there be dragons.") and synced to any other machines hooked up to your account. This is also incredibly convenient when you upgrade machines. All your pictures, docs, everything, are almost instantly brought to the new device. Upgrading has become painless for me simply because I can just download a program, log-in, and I already have access to everything. I highly recommend you make "my Dropbox" your new "My Documents."