Get yourself a server

Continuing with the spring cleaning theme: you need a server.

Yep: you. A place to put files. Some for sharing, some just for safekeeping. A place far, far from home. A place with professionals who take care of the machines.

This weekend, I've been playing with really using my iDisk. It's an Apple-branded WebDAV server that's lightly baked into MacOS X, which means it's just there. Want to copy things to or from your iDisk? It's just like copying them to another folder. And it's fast: the computer keeps a local copy of everything on your disk, and sends stuff to the server in its spare time. It's about $100/year; I'm using right now to make sure I can see the book I'm working on from whichever machine I happen to be using. This weblog is sync'd, too.

Want web hosting? Pair has for a long time been a premium-service, premium price Web host. They've been one of our Web hosts for years. I have no complaints, and I'm a demanding customer. They just rolled out a new, beefy deal called PairLite, "perfect for hobby or project sites. With 50Gb/month of bandwidth and 2Gb of disk space (and 50 mailboxes), that's a hell of a hobby. $100/year or $30 for three months.

It's not a panacea, but it's nice to have a place out there to tuck files, just in case something goes sour with your machine, or just in case you need those files in some unexpected corner of the world.