Well, I think that some stuff would have to be stored locally, at least for the time being. I’m guessing that the caching would be done on per-application basis. So your Office Suite would be doing it’s own storage on Microsoft servers, your Email would be doing it’s thing and etc.

Torrent clients would still work in the good old fashioned way saving shit locally. :)

Re: notifications – Ugh I have no clue why this happens. They are not getting bounced – I don’t get return messages back for them. So I don’t think it’s the mail server. Now is it the plugin, wordpress or my PHP installation. Sigh… Will need to look into this some more.

Oh, and I still have no email notifications

In that scenario I can see the use of remote storage, a service that automatically backups everything I save would be awesome (if it was free, which is unlikely to happen soon for a hard-drive sized stash of data) or the remote caching you were talking about.

I hadn’t thought of the auto-save to a server and sync when online thing, but for working across 2 computers it could be very useful. Minor example is the Firefox extension Foxmarks that backups and synchronises your bookmarks with a remote server, although that raises some issues with what you do when you want most stuff to sync automatically but not everything, shouldn’t be too hard to get around though.

Even so, I’d always like to have my own copy of everything along with all the application software to do stuff with it – don’t want to lose my data or be locked out of it by the shifting sands of the computer industry. Oh, and there’s always the issue of whether remotely storing gigabytes of torrented stuff of dubious legality is a clever thing to do :wink: (depends on the policy of the storer)

[quote comment=”4749″]If I’m looking for a file I normally find it easier to remember (or work out) what folder it’s in than what I named it..[/quote]

To tell you the truth, these relational filesystems scare the living shit out of me. I’m terrified of giving up control over my storage to a database. Still, I think this is where we are heading – because those are the usage patterns I see among the end user population.

And the popularity of applications which organize your files for you supports it. People just dump all their pictures into “My Pictures” and let Picassa or other app like that to tag them and sort them. They dump all their music into the iTunes folder, and let it manage them.

I’m not saying this is a good or a bad trend. I just thing this is where we are heading.

[quote comment=”4749″]but until then, I’m keeping my stuff on my hard drive where I know I can get at it.[/quote]

True, but remote caching of your documents by some online app is a very attractive option. As a rule, people are usually very bad about doing backups. And almost no one has off-site backups of their private shit. I do, but only of my important stuff. But if most applications have their online counterparts…

What I mean is that some next generation Office Live will save your document both locally (for fast access) and remotely (so you can get it when you are not home).

Say you are writing an essay or an article, and your power goes down. So you go over to your friends house. There it turns out that he/she doesn’t have office installed, but you simply log into the online app, and finish writing using an interface that is almost identical to the native one – only running in the browser. Then you come back home, and your Office automatically syncs up with the server and pulls down your paper so that you can print it. I’m pretty confident this is a model that we will see surfacing in the next 3-4 years.

If I’m looking for a file I normally find it easier to remember (or work out) what folder it’s in than what I named it..

and RIAs don’t really to appeal to me since I’d prefer to keep my stuff where I have control over it, and the applications to use it similarly need to be somewhere I can do what I want with them.

Maybe if ultra high speed broadband was being broadcast wirelessly across the entire face of the country… but until then, I’m keeping my stuff on my hard drive where I know I can get at it.