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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are

Until it's time to back them up, right?

What is "backing them up?" Why am I doing this? What purpose does it serve? It sounds like something that people with pocket protectors care about... They like the arcana of playing with PCs whereas I like music.

In all seriousness, if losing all your music when you lose your tablet is a fatal flaw, the solution is to expand MobileMe so that it syncs my music to the cloud, not to ask me to know what FAT32 is and why some hard drives can hold a 1080p movie but others can't even if they claim to have enough disc space and...

Oh, my head hurts just trying to describe the awful experience that is using a PC.

> the solution is to expand MobileMe so that it syncs my music to the cloud

Is this something MobileMe is currently capable of, or are you saying that it's up to Apple to implement that solution?

So far, there are rumours suggesting that Apple will implement music syncing via MobileMe, but right now it only syncs "productivity" data like contacts, bookmarks, and email accounts.

If someone's too air-headed to understand the utility of backups, why would they pay $100/yr to do it?

And that $100 would only get you 20GB, so you'd be limited to a total of around 2.5 of those 1080p movies you're apparently throwing around (assuming a conservative 8GB each). And it'd take approximately a million years to sync them on any typical home broadband connection. And you'd better not be doing that over 3G, oh boy.

No, moving to THE CLOUD just gives you a different set of problems.

Let's have a little empathy for people like me who aren't so technical, please. "Backup" is jargon for one particularly brittle and error-prone way to solve the problem of "What happens to my music when I drop my tablet into a vat of acid?"

It's no surprise that people don't understand its utility. Quite honestly, it seems like most companies don't implement backups particularly effectively. If "professionals" can't get it right, how does giving someone a filesystem solve the problem?

My suggestion to you is to think about how a post-PC device should solve the disaster-recovery problem in a way that appeals to postPC users. If you can invent something that a luddite like me would use, you have a YCombinator startup right there.

Think about DropBox as an example. It's a folder. And it syncs. DropBox is right on the edge of PC/Post-PC. It still works with files, but all of the moving parts are out of sight.

So go out and invent the post-PC disaster-recovery mechanism. Make it like DropBox, not like backing up music. Just don't try to drag people backwards to being sysadmins. That's not going to work.

Someone needs to make a much cheaper and more user-friendly Drobo-style solution, perhaps with compatible cables for iPads, iPhones, etc.

You plug your device in, it synchs, and then you're free to fling it out the window. No monthly fees to keep up with, and if done well, it's basically a one-time $100 back-up investment. Make it work easily with OS X and Windows, and people like my parents would never have to worry about the dog eating their laptop again.

I tell Time Machine to back up. It will do just that for me, I don’t need to know where the actual music files are for that. This is really no problem. (This is from the perspective of a casual users.)

Which is why the OS (Win7, iOS, OSX at least) reminds you to back up the system and makes it easy to do so (ie, attach drive with sufficient space, go).

iOS requires iTunes on a PC/Mac to back up, but this is likely a business decision to make more $$, and could easily be replaced by a clouded or local backup appliance.

In this mechanism you have to willingly ignore the backup requests... it's like the seatbelt beep in modern cars - at that point, it's 99% PEBKAC if no backup exists.

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