How’s this for having a bad week: First, the spinning beachball of death starts to get even worse on my MacBook Pro. Then, I boot up my relatively new iMac, and rather than a beautiful blue screen, I get the white screen of death with a file folder blinking back at me, which is never a good sign.

First reaction: “Crap”.

Second reaction: “I hope my AppleCare hasn’t expired”.

Third reaction: “Great, another trip to Carbon Computing”.

If there is a silver lining to a double shot of computer woes, it is that an increasing amount of my computing has migrated to the cloud. I’m a big user of Google Docs to handle word documents and spreadsheets. I made the move to Google Apps and GMail a few months ago. And DropBox has become a “virtual” harddrive/storage depot for lots of personal and professional documents.

It means that having hard drives go crash and burn isn’t a catastrophe as much as an aggravation. When I was told the hard drive on the MacBook Pro would likely have to be replaced, I just cut and paste a bunch of data into DropBox, which was a snap because I happily pay $99/year for 50GB of storage.

Putting your computing world into the cloud can be a leap of faith but it’s a no-brainer for people like myself who are mobile and use different devices to access data and services. At the end of the day, hard drive problems are still a pain in the rear end but rather than being a disaster, they’re bumps in the road.

And, of course, I had everything backed up on an external hard drive just in case because it’s always good to have a backup plan!