As I’ve discussed earlier, I love reformatting my computer… At face value, it might seem like a waste of time, but in the end, lots of lessons are learned. That, and, you get faster every single time… and you get a squeaky clean computer.

Let me just go through where my data lives, and how it made my life so much easier to get back on track after my reformat.

• Email

  • Gmail: I think I’m going to start using Gmail as my sole email application. It seems like for some reason, this time around, SMTP doesn’t want to work in Mail.app. Also, since I’ve already gone Google for RSS feeds as well as my budgeting/documenting/spreadsheet-ing, might as well commit to… er… submit to the Google overlords.
  • I have to go and somehow find a way to match the folder structure I have on my desktop to Gmail’s labeling structure.
  • Is there a way to move all your mail from one service provider to another? Is Yahoo really going to provide unlimited storage? This really isn’t a selling point, though, since I don’t think I’m even hitting 10% of my storage space yet.
    • But, of course, through the wonders of gDisk, I’ve begun backing up my most important documents, like blog post rough drafts and such.

• Contact Information

  • Plaxo: I love it. It’s free for us normal users… plus, there’s a little bit of the social magic built into the app: you can send “eCards” to people with their information and such.
  • I don’t use Plaxo much, but I do use the synchronization tool with Address Book, and you know how I love to think that syncing is going to be one of the many killer web apps.

• Calendar

  • This is next… to go with Google Calendar? How about Plaxo? How about something completely new?

• Bookmarks

  • What? Delicious? The only thing I needed to reinstall to get back into bookmarking was the bookmarking extension for Firefox and Safari.
  • I’m satisfied with delicious to even think about moving to ma.gnolia.

• Feeds

  • Google Reader: I love it. I think I might start integrating the “Starred Items” on the blog like Alex Argo has done.

After all… they’re all bits and bytes. It’s the application that brings that information to life. With web apps, though, you get a handy method of not having to deal with keeping track of your own data: the system does it for you.

Actually, more like… the system administrators of the web applications are doing that management of data for you.

Hey, it’s less work for me! But… alas, advertising revenue for them…