On Monday night, the hard drive failed. All of my attempts to revive it failed.

On Tuesday, we delivered it to Mac-Ave in Victor for repair.

With three computers available to me, it’s not like I’ve been knocked off line. There’s my old MacBookPro that was stored in a desk drawer (still powered on, as I discovered, since November 2010), an iMac in my office that I use for keeping books and business data and is also used by my part-time assistant, and the iMac at home that my wife uses.

First problem I ran into was there is no easy way to open RAW files from my Nikon D7000 in the CS2 version of PhotoShop on the old MacBook Pro and the new version of Lightroom (which would have solved that problem) would install on the older OSX on the laptop. So I had to install Lightroom on the two iMacs.

This forced me to use the iMacs more than the laptop (which at this point has been reduced almost exclusively to a note-taking machine when I’m covering meetings).

For contacts and calendar and even e-mail I’ve long preferred the interface of Microsoft’s Entourage, but months ago, Apple made syncing calendar through MobileMe between Entourage and iPhone impossible.

So, in using the iMacs, I knew any calendar items I created in Entourage would be trapped on whatever machine it was created on, so I turned to Google’s calendar (we use Google for thebatavian.com e-mail). In this case, at least I could access my calendar from any computer, but I became curious if there was an app that would sync with Google Calendar — and there was, so I downloaded it and it’s working great so far.

It turns out both iCal and Contacts on Mac now sync with Google.

I’ve never been a fan of the interface of either application, but what the heck — bring all my data into sync of four devices seems like a good thing to do.

At this point, it would seem MobileMe is unnecessary.

Until this morning, though, I never even bothered with iDisk. This morning I logged in … it’s a pretty zippy upload and pretty easy to access from a Mac, so now I’m thinking I’ll use it more to store documents I want to access from more than one computer — such as photos and business documents.

I’m also thinking I’ll use Lightroom more on the iMacs because of the superior screen size, and I’ll store important DNG files on the iDisk.

I need to get away from storing so many image files on the laptop — the high volume of heavy files stored on the laptop may have been a contributing factor to the hard disk failing. There was less than 20G of space available on the 320G drive when it went down.

So, a bit of a disaster has forced me to re-evaluate how I handle data and documents and putting me far deeper into the cloud than previously. We’ll see how it goes.