By Jeffrey the Barak

Stuff? That could mean anything but more often than not these days it means your information, not so much your pictures and music, but your contacts, and your calendar.

Back in the paper and leather era, we could lose our Filofax and lose all, but with today’s synching and backing up, only an exceptionally careless person would lose his or her vital information. The choices today are more focused on local versus cloud storage of this valuable data. If you have a PC (trying not to laugh) then it is likely you keep your calendar and contacts in Microsoft Outlook, part of Microsoft Office for Microsoft Windows, a big old Buick of a program responsible for devastating data loss each time the single “pst” file is corrupted.

Or if you have a Mac, you probably use the Address Book and the iCal calendar and you may keep them in synch with your iPhone via iTunes or Mobile Me. Of course if you also use Google, and I wonder why anyone would not be using Google as much as possible, you can, with a little research and study, find a way to import and synchronize your contacts into Gmail contacts, your calendars into Google Calendar, and your most important documents and spreadsheets into Google Docs, so even if you lose every piece of equipment when a mountain flattens your town, you still retain all in the cloud. All you have to know is your gmail email address and one password and there it all is.

There are of course many choices when it comes to hardware, operating systems and software, cloudware etc., but as these options develop and multiply, there are still people who lose their phone and lose their stuff in the process. It’s akin to keeping all your money in your pocket. Sooner or later you’ll lose it.

Currently I use Apple’s iCal and Address Book and I have Mobile Me to keep my iMac, Macbook and iPhone in sync, and I also export to Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar. Plus I have a folder in my address book called notes, which uses the contacts program to record lists such as to-do, waiting-for, sizes, etc.

We have feedback and comments here at the-vu, so If you have any different ways of keeping it all, let us know!

Tags: Address Book, Apple, backup, calendar, contacts, data, google, iCal, info, iphone, personal information, stuff, synch

This entry was posted
on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 18:09 and is filed under Jeffrey the Barak, Objects.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.