Matt’s Cuppa

As much as I am all for using web-based applications, I’m not for using them all the time. Web apps offer all sorts of advantages– the benefits of increased productivity, mobility, etc. The downside is the reliability factor. You’re not in control over the safety of content you produce via a web-based application.

Yeah, that screencap above refers to the latest article I was working on. Rather frustrating. Thankfully, I have a local copy.

As I was telling my wife about this (venting, actually) she turned to me and informed me that using web apps is a lot like being in the financial industry. You’ve got to diversify so that if one sector of the market tanks, you can still meet your investors’ demands by turning more heavily to parts of your portfolio that are not affected.

What does this analogy mean to the web worker? It means that if it’s important, back it up someplace that’s not on the web. If it’s on a local PC, back it up online instead. It means that perhaps one should use one app provider for every piece of content one produces. Numerous other suggestions are out there as well. Email your documents to yourself at a special email address you create for storing these. Purge your account of unneeded content periodically. Perform regular maintenance on your local PC. Consider printing hard copies of particularly important documents. The list goes on, but you get the idea. You only need to lose one piece of important content to drive home how important diversification is to the knowledge worker.

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