Sending your worries to the clouds

I just came back home after a pleasant ten day holiday with good friends. As soon as I came back, I went to my bedroom to pick up my laptop, which turned out not to be on its usual place. I then looked for it at its unusual place. It wasn't there either. I then looked at all the places where I could have placed it, but it was nowhere to be found.

I realised I probably had forgotten it at a café or restaurant before I left for holiday, so I walked around to a few places, asking waiters and other staff if they had found a laptop that looked lost. Nobody had.

The moral of this is not that one should be careful with one's laptop. The moral is that I never for a moment felt anxious. I have all my data in different clouds: google, Apple, Microsoft and Adobe. Even if the laptop was lost for ever, I knew no data would be lost. I might have to pay for a new laptop, which admittedly would be irritating, but no data would be lost.

I'm aware that there are some security risks with cloud services, but for my mostly innocent data, the benefit of convenience vastly compensates for the risk of data theft.

(I did find the laptop at home in the end. I had for some reason placed piles of paper on top of it before leaving, and as soon as I reached for the papers, the laptop smiled happily at me, like a dog when its owner comes home from work.)

When all valuables are in distant clouds.