Our home network has taken a beating. Our desktop died, after removing the ad-on video graphics adapter I can reboot but it will crash within 3-6 minutes, not sure why.
My wife's old laptop's power supply died, and by the time I got that replaced our anti-virus subscription had ended; unfortunately I didn't notice that.

The lap top got severely infected with a virus before I could complete the latest Windows update, and the virus writers are getting good. Too good for me - I was unable to remove the virus, it took over Microsoft's anti-malware application's role, disabled Windows updates and virus definition updates, and even disabled the restore/reinstall from local image feature on the lap top. The only way I was going to get a working Windows on the lap top would be to buy a new version, and I'm too cheap and the hardware is too old for that to be a reasonable approach.

The desktop was down too. Sigh. Luckily I had backed up all of the critical data onto some local LAN attached storage (mostly baby pictures and videos - the important stuff) and onto flikr.Time for an alternative approach - I went to ubuntu.com and got an .iso image for an install CD and also made an installable USB flash drive. Both worked fine, the flash drive was faster but the older systems won't boot off of USB flash.

I'm pretty happy with the results - the wife and kids can get on-line again, and open-office allows for homework and the laser printer works fine with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu also offers something called "Ubuntu One" that provides 2 GB of network storage - "cloud" storage nowadays - so that you can store your files and documents in a location that is accessible almost anywhere. This reminds me quite a bit of drop.io, a similar but more advanced network storage//cloud storage scheme. These schemes offer some real value and we've started using them at home - well at least I have, the wife and kids may need a little training and selling before they'll use it.

Many of us use cloud resources all of the time (amazon.com and google provide many services from the cloud), but this is one of the first "visible" and tangible cloud features many of us have run into. The disconnect of the data from our physical locations and moving it into the cloud is what provides the value for us, and it's pretty obvious and apparent when you use it.

Now we just need all of our apps and servers to play nicely in the new era, when personal cloud storage makes more sense than local storage for most data. It isn't too difficult to work with now, but it's still mostly an external add on. It feels a little like a hack, not a nicely integrated feature of the applications that should use it directly. Feels like the beginning steps of some completely new ways to do things are starting to take form. With the new approach available for free on my existing home equipment I definitely appreciate the new options and look forward to seeing where this will all end up.