Moving To The Cloud

Recently, my hard drive gave out on my personal laptop.  Around the same time, my work laptop fell victim to malware and had to be re-imaged.  I back up my data, but restoring applications and configuration settings is a multi-day drudgery.  Making things worse, I was still stubbornly using Outlook as my Personal Information Manager, and though I synchronized with my phone, a hard drive crash spells a tiresome, error-prone restoration effort.  I love my HTC Touch Pro2 smart phone, but most of my synchronization is through Windows ActiveSync, and with this constant Windows Update and anti-virus/spyware arms race, I'm considering ditching Windows altogether.  (This installer for Ubuntu looks like it makes things easy.)

So now that I'm rebuilding from the rubble of my old laptop, I'm thinking I'll drag myself into the 21st century and move my data into the Cloud.  I want to get as much as possible out onto remote servers that are cared for better than I care for my hardware.  So I made a list of the things I do with desktop applications on my personal computer, and have started investigating Cloud alternatives.  Here's my first stab.

Email/Contacts/Calendar/Tasks
Let the shaming ensue, but I like Outlook.  I like dragging emails into my tasks or calendar and having them morph into the appropriate object.  I like the ease of synchronization with my WindowsMobile phone.  I like all the fun fields on a Contact record.  I like the interface.  But the data is hard to back up, hard to access except through Microsoft applications and not in the Cloud (I don't know if hotmail has sync features, but I don't need yet another email account).  So I'm thinking of moving to GMail and Google Calendar, probably moving my domain to GMail For Business for $50 per year.  Yes, their task manager is primitive and I hate the calendar interface, but if I'm that bummed about it, Google has APIs I can use to write my own damn UI.

Note: A colleague did show me a hosting service called dreamhost.com that allows not only Google suite integration, but shell access and an expanding list of plug-ins.  It looks tempting, but I don't know when I'll have the time to take advantage of all the things it offers.

Word Processing/Spreadsheets/Power Points
Google Docs is the obvious solution here, and there are convenient importer/converters for my Office documents.  The formatting and layouts aren't as robust as the desktop alternatives, but I can't remember the last time I used that extra control.

Personal Finance
I currently use Intuit's Quicken to track and manage my finances, and I can enter expenses on Landware's Pocket Quicken and syncrhonize it to my desktop.  It works great, and I love it.  But now, Intuit has decided to end its licensing to Landware and, following its acquisition of Mint, has scrapped Quicken Online as well.  It looks like their new Cloud product, Mint.com, will combine the "best" of both Quicken and Mint.  Sadly, the only mobile support is for the iPhone, but if the Web interface looks good on a mobile device, this won't be too much of a hardship. As long as I have Internet access...

Password Management
I currently have SplashID installed on my desktop, which synchronizes with the SplashID on my phone.  It's a great solution, and probably my most-used application -- on both my phone and my desktop.  Happily, the same company has a SplashID Live Cloud solution which can import/export (though not synchronize) from/to the desktop file format.  I think this might be a good product to have both in the Cloud and on the desktop, just in case I need the information and don't have access to the Web.

Programming
This one is easy.  Add a github plug-in to Eclipse, and your source code and resources are under Cloudy source control.

Photographs
Most of my data is digital photographs.  On my desktop, I like the ZoomEx utility provided by Canon, but I do like using Picasa on the desktop and its easy synchronization to PicasaWeb.  With my old desktop computer's CD burner broken, this has already helped me get all the old photographs off its hard drive.

Music
This one seems difficult.  I'm not an iPod/iTunes user and I'm not interested in becoming one.  But The Locker from MP3Tunes seems to provide a good solution for putting MP3s in the Cloud and making them accessible from various devices.  There's even an open API against which to program your own music clients.  Very cool.

That's my initial game plan for migrating my personal computing to the Web.  Has anyone encountered any better online solutions for these different areas?