Carbonite

More than at any other point in the year, the holiday season is a time for creating and preserving memories, particularly photos and videos. A new study* from Carbonite, a provider of online backup solutions for consumers and small and medium sized businesses, found photos are considered the most valuable files consumers have on their computers.

Despite the importance of these digital photos, many people may not be backing them up to protect them. In order to keep these most precious memories safe this holiday season, Carbonite offers the following tips:

• Download memories off of all your devices: The Carbonite study shows digital cameras remain the top device for taking photos, with 78 percent of those surveyed using them. However, cell phones or smartphones are increasingly being used by consumers (used by 59 percent). Two-thirds of people who take pictures with a phone simply leave the photos on the device without backing them up. Among camcorder users, half leave their videos on their device and do nothing else with them. During this busy season, it is easy to lose a phone—or drop it in the egg nog—and lose all the photos stored on its internal memory. A camcorder may be harder to misplace, but it can be just as easy to damage.Read more

By Jeff Zbar
www.chiefhomeofficer.com

Seth Godin wrote recently of "the end of magic." He was lamenting how the newness of the new seems to have passed us by — how the really cool tools and applications that once wowed us in the workplace and life now are so commonplace that they are taken for granted, and no longer devices of Wow!

Wait. Take a moment to ponder the tools we use and what they bring to our daily lives. You might respectfully disagree.

Every day, I use services and tools that keep me connected with the world outside in ways that still seem magical. My BlackBerry brings the Internet and its motherlode of possibilities to a device smaller than a deck of cards (iPhone users will only smirk at the possibilities borne from their device).Read more

By Jeff Zbar
www.homeofficehighway.com

To meteorologists and remote workers alike, The Cloud is a beautiful thing.

One makes his living off cloud formations. The other has discovered a mobility, flexibility and an untethered experience working in the cloud. These include teleworkers, telecommuters, road warriors and others released from place-based work.

For those not clear, the "cloud" — according to Wikipedia — "is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud that supports them." In other words, all your applications — and even your documents, if you want — are stored and hosted via a computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser.Read more

By Jeff Zbar
www.homeofficehighway.com

Call it a leap of faith.

Every time my family travels on Home Office Highway, I load up a flash drive with documents, files and notes for stories and columns in progress.

This year, except for a flash-drive built into a card reader for my camera, I brought no portable drive.

All my documents, files and notes were / are stored in the Cloud. Notes for my columns, interviews for pending stories, even all the notes related to our destinations, RV parks and other trip details were stored either to Google Notes, Gmail or Google Docs.Read more