Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

I'm trying SkyDrive and Amazon's S3. I like the sharing option with SkyDrive for my personal stuff and I like the metered charges that come with S3 for business use. (Amazon also offers computing services which I haven't tried yet, but the appeal of a server-less business is hard to resist).

Of course the elephant in the room is privacy. Who will have access to these files? Will Google scan my docs to display related adds? I suspect anything I want to keep private will have to be encrypted before sending to the Googleplex.

On the other hand, I want to be in a position that if my office burned to the ground, I could run down to my local dealer, pickup another laptop and be back at work losing anything but hardware.

The older I get, the less I want to deal with hardware. I'll figure out how to protect my privacy - it's well worth it to have online storage and computing services.