Don’t get me wrong, I *like* the idea of being able to access all my projects at any moment in time, from any device I happen to have in my pocket.  As mobile game developer, the device I happen to have on my person at any given point in time is pretty d*mn random in fact.  It might be a laptop, it might be a phone, or a tablet, or a phablet, or something in between, depending on the product I am working on.  So I get the allure, I get the sexxy that is driving people to keep everything in Dropbox or on Google, or One Drive, or any of the myriad of other cloud-based options out there.  You want to take it with you.

Until sh*t goes bad.

I managed to lose access to everything one day last week, just one day which turned into nearly an entire week of lost time.  My internet services all went down in the office (which took my provider 3 days to fix, and they are still on alert because it may happen again).  I had to stay at the office in order to wait for the service person, so heading out to Starbucks for the “free” wifi was only an emergency option (and for what I do, their connection is way too slow and nowhere near secure enough).  I could access my information via the 4g enabled device in my pocket, but when you are working on slides for a conference, tipping-tapping away on your iPhone is tedious at best.

So while the cloud connections have allowed for a greater range of freedoms when it comes to access, to mobility and flexibility, they are, at the same time, becoming golden leashes, keeping us tethered.  If those connections get interrupted, work is lost.  I run a tiny game studio, everyone works via remote.  I only lost a couple of days of productivity, but imagine if I were a billion dollar corporation.  Even an hours worth of downtime could lose me millions of hours (a girl can dream, right?).

And, while I still have a bag of tricks I can use to get information to where it needs to be on time, those are all legacy bits.  Things I learned and developed a long time ago, back when “sneakernet” was still a likely option (if you all lived in the same town at any rate) still work today, but that’s all legacy stuff.  I’d have a hard time learning it today, simply because the up and coming generation doesn’t seem to take that kind of dead-air into account.