This, among many other reasons, is why some of us old guys are skeptical that cloud computing and cloud storage are the answer.
I was doing my taxes and despite my better judgement I was going for the cheaper doing it online thing rather than springing for the more expensive download of the software. I stop for a few minutes in the middle of itemizing a bunch of donations to help the daughter with a homework problem. I return to find out the system has logged me out for inactivity so all of the entry I had just done was gone with the wind.
Oh, and they send you a new verification code to your email address that you have to enter every time you log in. A new email and code every time you log in even if they just logged you out two minutes before! Since my crappy CenturyLink internet service and email is less than reliable this is another cause for rejoicing.
Visiting Pants is starting to look more and more desirable.
For most of my history grad school time, I've been a staunch digital proponent for ease of use, storage, and access. Turns out I was pretty conservative about the whole thing.
In my final research seminar, two colleagues one night gave a scheduled, planned, prepared, passionate pitch about Zotero. Not how I want to do things, but cool.
Then they really got excitable and fired up that you don't have to store things on your own devices at all anymore, because you can store every bit of your research on the cloud with Zotero.
My adviser was teaching the class, and she'd heard a ton of my thoughts about the greatness of digital media. She looked my way just in time to see me visibly cringe and cross my arms, and she looked even more skeptical about the whole thing.
So I asked some questions about what happens when all of your work is placed in one basket, then there's a server glitch and all that work is gone. The answer, and the Signal Corps guy in me almost lost it all, "Oh, that'll never happen."
We dialogued. I was plainly never satisfied, and fight against that cult all the time.
Then in practical terms, when I was halfway through the first draft of my dissertation, I had it stored in three different places, each chapter its own set of files in its own folder. At that point, it amounted to 18 different files. One magical day, for no good reason, 17 of them disappeared.
Thankfully, I had printed copies still as well as copies e-mailed to my adviser, because counting on one storage solution is just begging to fail.
And yeah, I'm ready to work tonight.
