By Shep McAllister from HackCollege.com
Tonight, my MacBook Pro became unresponsive, and would not boot up after a hard reset. It's happened once before, and the fix was as easy as reinstalling the OS and restoring from an old time machine backup. Still though, it took time, and I didn't have a functional computer for roughly 24 hours during the busiest time of year.
Anyway, at the beginning of this semester I proclaimed on Lifehacker.com that I would not do any assignments with Microsoft Office this semester, and tonight my choice was affirmed. I'm pretty good about backing up my system, but it's been a few days. If I had been writing my final term papers and only saving them to my hard drive, they would have been wiped out, and I would have probably stabbed myself in the neck.
At HackCollege, we're big fans of cloud-based software like Evernote and Google Docs that keep all of your assignments backed up online, and I found out firsthand just how invaluable this practice can be. With all my final papers and presentations nestled away in the cloud under Google's watchful, motherly eye, I can honestly say that I saw my computer crash and burn in a moment of need, and didn't feel the slightest twinge of stress.