Astronomy Magazines and Clouds

I have just set up a home based "Cloud" service that allows me to back up everything from my various computer devices to a special type of 2 TB hard drive that plugs into my router. My main laptop now automatically gets backed up onto this on a continuous basis through my wireless network. Obviously the one drawback is that if my house burns down the drive goes with it. The advantage is that I buy the drive once and don't have to pay a company recurring fees for external service. However my Dropbox account (only a free one) links to the cloud system as a device so if I want to use that as well I can. 

That is only part of it - it also backs up my photographs and music to the home cloud from my PC, iPhone and iPad. Now if I want music I go onto my iPhone (or any device), run the iPhone cloud App and select the music from the cloud drive! Centralised music. I also have a bluetooth speaker so I usually just use my iPhone with the cloud, set it to bluetooth on and play the music.

This is not just from the house! Anywhere I have internet access I can access anything from my cloud drive - so if I am in Spain and want to show photos from my cloud I can do so!

The same applies to WORD Documents and PDFs etc - for example If I am working on a WORD document I can drag it from my PC to the cloud drive and immediately access it from my iPhone or iPad.

I found that it is an excellent way of managing PDF files. I have subscribed to the PDF only option for "The Astronomer" magazine for some time now. I usually forget to save them or save them somewhere I cant find! I have just stored (all 12) 2014 issues on the cloud and can now go onto my iPad(wherever I am) , open the cloud app and "The Astronomer" folder and there they all are. PDF magazines are ideal for reading on the iPad. I will work back through the issues storing them when I can.

I also now subscribe to the online only editions of "Sky and Telescope" and "Astronomy" US based magazines. It is very straightforward to save these as PDFs and I now read those on my iPad as well.

If you are a BAA member and have registered on their website you have access to any issue of the BAA Journal online as a downloadable PDF. A word of warning  - they are all there from issue 1 which was October 1890!! At 6 a year that adds up to quite a lot. However I now have a BAA Journal folder on my cloud!

I have copies of astronomy magazines going back to the seventies so a large chunk of my house is packed with them - I may soon be thinking about selling them off!!