Friday, April 27, 2007

Safekeeping

Warning: GEEK ALERT

My mission is to get ALL on the stuff I care about OFF my computer.

I am in the process of putting all my MP3s, Photos and Videos (mainly AVI copies of my DVDs) onto Network Storage device (AKA Portable hard drive hooked up to my home network). That way, PC's on my home network(up to 4: [1 decent one,1 semi decent, 2 shitters] in various places now) can access that stuff, which is pretty handy (think: choosing a DVD to watch in bed on the laptop wirelessly, accessing the whole MP3 library wirelessly, sharing some photos on the TV etc etc - all at the same time.)
So that is the media taken care of. What about emails? MS Outlook famously sucks at not easily allowing multiple machines to access a single Outlook account. I decided that online mail WOULD allow multi location (simultaneously if needed)access to a common email account, which is just one reason I have converted the whole Truant house to Gmail.
I have been raving about Gmail for a while and after 18 months or so of using it I am convinced that it's actually safer to keep stuff like emails and documents online as opposed to locally on your own computer. The main advantages for me is now I don't need to worry about backing up my data if/when my PC crashes. Sure, I could run RAID and be more diligent with backing up stuff, but after a while having DVDs of data sitting around isn't exactly ideal either - you could lose it, or it could fall into the wrong hands. Anyway, I digress.
But what about the OLD outlook emails? Wouldn't it be nice to put them on my Gmail so I can really get rid of all that old stored stuff?

After a bit of investigation I found out how to do it. I mean properly, not some half assed 'forwarding' type of solution.