The Problem with Geeks

So, I'm sitting on my computer, staring at the UbuntuOne icon. I Googled it. Turns out it allows you to back up 2GB of your stuff to the cloud so you can recover it, for free!

I run off to use it right away - I've been using Ubuntu Karmic Koala for months now, and I'm amazed I just noticed it!

I select the data I need to back up...

the data I need to back up... ahh...

Well. There isn't any, is there?


Sure, I spend hours and hours a week on the computer, reading Digg and Slashdot, building and compiling my system, ordering the OpenMoko phone, but when you get down to it, I, like many geeks, don't actually use my computer *for* anything. I do use Twitter a lot, but that's mostly from my cell phone. If I do write anything, it's usually on the "cloud" already, so to speak - I use Google Docs to type my papers, Gmail for my email... if I have any pictures they're on TwitPic, and if I ever had more I'd just get a Flikr. My videos are on Hulu or YouTube. My music comes in via Internet radio.

I've even moved my programming projects to Google Wave.

As I sit here looking at my nearly empty home folder, filled only with desktop backgrounds of past and present, technical PDF files I've downloaded like the Smoothwall documentation to be printed out, and random files that were only ever used once, I can't help but feel a bit creeped out.


I've worked on hundreds of people's computers. They usually have them full of pictures. Gigabytes and gigabytes of pictures of everything, a record of their whole life since they got their computers, until their computers fail and they forgot to back the pictures up. Then they cry about it. I've never cried over my own lost data. The only pictures on my computer are stock photography from istockphoto.com that I use in web development.



It's not that I don't have *any* important data. I have lots of important data. Mostly images of people's hard drives kept as back-ups. Back-ups of websites and SQL dumps. A SQL dump of every possibly tripcode up to six characters long (a sort of 0phcrack-type approach) Nearly half a terabyte of that sort of thing. Nothing that I could use 2GB of storage for. Or even 50GB.


That's all, really. Just a strange commentary on how the power-users and inventors of computers, and the applications you use on them... have no real use for any of that crap.