Emailed Questions, Part 5

We have looked at many recommended apps and sites over the last weeks. Today we will wrap it up answering some of your final questions dealing with the question, “What do you suggest?”

Online or Cloud Storage has been all the rage for the past year or so. “Is it here to stay?” “Which one should I use?” and “Should I trust it?” are questions I often receive.

So in answer to your questions, yes it is here to stay. With storage space becoming so inexpensive storage is no longer an issue. For a quick comparison 1GB of storage today costs approximately $0.0375. In 1980 the same amount of storage was $437,000. No wonder I had a 10MB hard drive then and a 1TB now.

This also means that online storage even inexpensive it is also much more dependable than your local hard drive, both good news. I believe you can rest assured it will be around for a while. It is easy to use and has major backup, redundancy and dependability through the large data warehouses that have your information. The bad part about it is that like every company, it is as secure and dependable as the most dissatisfied employee. If an employee at one of these storage facilities goes bad they could wreak havoc.

That being said, I use online storage extensively and have never, ever had an issue (uh-oh, maybe I should not have said that out loud). However, I never ever store anything online that could be used to damage me. For instance, my SSN, tax returns, bank account information, etc. all stay locally on my hard drive. But all of my columns and other documentation I have stay in the cloud.

There are two I recommend. If you are interested in signing up for either use the links given for some extra space. They both have minor pluses and minuses but both are excellent and dependable. However, anything could be hacked including your local hard drive. One is Dropbox (rd.dblclx.com/use-Dropbox) which starts with 2GB of free storage and the other is Copy (rd.dblclx.com/freeCopy) which has 20GB. I just gave you almost $9 million dollars in 1980 money.

Next is how can I use my home computer when it is at home and I am in Kansas? There are many to choose from. I use a free Google Chrome Browser extension called, “Chrome Remote Desktop” which can be installed in your browser from the Chrome store. You must set it up on the two computers you wish to work between.

Chrome Remote DesktopThen when you want to log into your home computer, as long as you have left it on, you can do so from a remote location. It will be just like you are sitting at your desk 1,000 miles away. It does not handle multiple monitors very well. If that were the case I would recommend Teamviewer.com which is free for individuals; however, it has a corporate price for business use along with more options than Chrome.

I have also used it to help friends fix problems with their computers. If they have it installed they can allow me to look at and control their computer. But only if they invite me in with a very long numeric code which changes each time it is used.

Next week we will begin looking at Windows 10.