At home, I’ve three computers that I use regularly: my Asus Eee PC, a really rather heavy HP laptop, and an even heavier and larger (and much more ancient) Sony Vaio. All run Ubuntu, though the HP has Windows XP on it for the times when I have to boot up in that flavour.

But, if the hard-drive broke on any of these machines, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

All my photos, and increasingly videos, are held at Flickr (I buy a DVD once a year of all the photos I have there, just for safety’s sake). All my documents are with the increasingly-good Google Docs. My code is held on my website, though backed-up daily. All my email, back to 2004, is held on my Google Apps for Your Domain. My list of passwords? I don’t have one, using my own password generator.

Of course, I do have some files held locally. The other machine in my house is a fairly old Mac Mini, which sits under the telly. I use it to play DVDs and sync my iPhone, but it also contains my music collection. Indeed, after an Amazon.co.uk “sell your stuff” spree, I have about five CDs left in the house. But, once more, if the hard-drive broke on this machine, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

I back up the 30G of data I hold within iTunes automatically every night, thanks to a piece of software called JungleDisk. This simply watches for changes within my iTunes folder, and uploads those changes to Amazon’s servers somewhere. I pay £1.89 a month for the storage (and like JungleDisk so much, I also spent a one-off £10.10 for the software). So, while undoubtedly it would be a hassle and a lengthy download if this disk broke, I’d again not lose anything; and JungleDisk also ensures that my music collection is available to me wherever I am in the world.

With the advent of services like Amazon S3, Flickr, Gmail and Google Docs, it strikes me that we don’t really need computers to have great big hard drives any more - certainly not on a laptop. Asus appear to be the first computer manufacturer to really understand this.

By leaving all my data on the cloud, am I ahead of the curve, I wonder? Or simply too trusting of Google/Flickr et al?