Cloud Services Revisited – Part 3 – Every note in the cloud

In our 3 part series on using the cloud for everyday things you need, we’ve covered backups and passwords, now we’ll cover the simple act of note taking.  The service I’m talking about is a tool/service called Evernote. Evernote is both a web service and a piece of software.  In brief it is a place to take notes that will automatically back them up and make them available through a website and a local client, but it’s much more than that.  It can change the way you keep track of everything from Meeting notes and magazine articles to your bills.

Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 3 – Every note in the cloud”

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 2 – Passwords

In Part 1 of this three part series, we talked about using Cloud Services for backups.  In Part 2, we’ll talk about how you can use the cloud to keep track of the myriad passwords you end up collecting and how you can start creating better passwords to protect you from attacks.  All this without risking storing your passwords in the open on someone else’s server, and always giving you a secure way to download a local backup.

Most of us have accounts all over the Internet, and most of them use some kind of username and password to let us access our account.  It may seem that the only way to keep track of them is to use the same password for most of the accounts.  Maybe you use a different one for your bank and a few other places, but it just becomes impossible to remember a different password for each site.  You could keep them all on Post-Its along your monitor, but hopefully you know that’s not a good idea.  So using a tool of some sort is a great way to get around this.  Several years ago I started using the password manager built into my browser to track passwords, and it was a great burden lifted.  I still used the same username and password on many sites, simply because I was lazy and didn’t want to create a new one.  But I used harder passwords more often and they were all remembered for me.  About a year ago, I started using a free service call LastPass to keep track of my passwords, and it has changed the way I work with passwords forever.

Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 2 – Passwords”

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 1 – Backups

Last year, I wrote an article about using the cloud for backups and doing it securely.  There have been some big changes in the area since then, and I wanted to return to it and update some of my recommendations and add some new tools to the mix as well.  This is part 1 of a three part series on using Cloud Services.  Part 1 will revisit backups, Part 2 will cover storing passwords securely in the cloud, and Part 3 will show you how to keep track of every thought that crosses your mind and make it available anywhere, all through the cloud. Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 1 – Backups”