June 2011
Beginner
504 pages
15h 9m
English
Chapter 8
Get Your Data to Go
To get things done today, you need the right information at your fingertips, no matter where you are. You will travel, relocate, switch jobs, use more computers, and generate larger quantities of data in your lifetime than any previous generation has. Your ability (or inability) to access that information on the go can make the difference between success and failure in work and life.
Every day, you create a digital trail that details your life. Your Sent mail folder describes your professional and personal relationships. Your digital photo and video archive documents family vacations, graduations, births, and the car accident you got into last year. You have your college papers, your résumé, and professional documents created at your last three jobs stowed away on your hard drive.
Years ago, you may have stored all the data you needed on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Now, in the age of MP3 players, ubiquitous broadband, personal camcorders, and digital cameras, you create and collect dozens of gigabytes of data per year. Modern smartphones have converged the creation and consumption of nearly every type of digital media into one device; as of this writing, one high-quality photo taken with a cameraphone is nearly 3MB.
You have three main ways to retrieve this data when you’re not sitting at the computer on which it lives:
- Store it “in the cloud” using web applications (webapps). Hack 67, “Access Your Most Important Files Anywhere with Dropbox,” and Hack ...
