Going Google Docs

For as long as I remember, I have been managing all my personal documents with a version control system: first CVS, then subversion, and during the last few years mercurial.

With CVS and subversion, I configured my home router as the version control server. I manually synced changes with the version control server using the command line tools that CVS and subversion provide.

Mercurial is a distributed version control system and fits better with my workflow: I do not need a central server: all computers can sync with each other.

As part of my experiment to migrate all my data and applications to web applications, I uploaded (almost) all my documents to Google Docs.

In Google Docs, I defined everything I work on as a project. Every project gets a folder and the folder contains all spreadsheets, notes, presentations, documents, PDFs and other types of files that are associated with that project. This project-oriented approach is inspired by the productivity methodology I follow.

Google Docs gives me instant access to all my documents from the two laptops I use and our kitchen computer. All my documents are always the latest version and I no longer need to manually sync changes between my computers. Furthermore, synchronization conflicts that occasionally happened when I used a version control system are eliminated.

As of today, I use Google Docs for all my documents with two exceptions: accounting data and LaTeX documents.

1. Accounting data: I have yet to find a web application that supports the flexibility of my current accounting application. So for the near future, I keep my financial data in a local repository.
2. LaTeX documents: Apparently, there exists an extension to write and compile LaTeX documents in Google Docs. Using this extension is on my to-do list. 

Moving to the cloud ...