Cloud Only Mode For Windows and Mac. Nothing Is Saved Local.
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 12/21/2014 1:00:00 AM
If your laptop or desktop acted more like an iPad or Chromebook, you would never get a virus. Really? Yes.
The reason I write about this topic so often is that so many people contact me with computer problems related to crashes, unwanted popup ads, spyware, ransomware, malware, viruses, trojan horses and all sorts of horrible attacks on their computers that they can't seem to get rid of.
There are many ways to avoid this kind of problem, but most people simply don't have any idea what to do to prevent it, or how to clean up the mess when it happens.
What amazes me is that the problem is getting worse, much worse, and the stakes are getting higher. Today's attackers are not just a nuisance, but they are looking for ways to make money, at your expense. In some cases, by earning money from ads that pop up on your screen, or by redirecting your searches to their search pages, but in many cases, they outright try to steal or extort money in exchange for giving you back your files, which they just destroyed.
How Cloud Only Mode would work.
Anyone who's ever used an iPad or Chromebook has already had a taste of Cloud Only Mode, because both of those devices were designed from the ground up to be cloud only devices. Both devices use the cloud to save and load files and settings, and the programs you run are denied access to local storage for anything other than buffering information to speed access to files.
If Windows and Mac desktop and laptop computers had Cloud Only Mode, you would sign-in using your cloud credentials, and the operating system would block access to local files and only allow you to run programs that specifically supported cloud based files, and any USB connected drives. For Apple systems, that would include iCloud Drive Apps and on Windows that would include any Apps designed for OneDrive. Both Windows and Macs would also allow access to programs that support other cloud storage platforms such as DropBox, or Google Drive, which collectively increase the number of supported programs quite a bit.
For most people, the list of supported programs would cover all their day-to-day activities, because most of the popular programs people use today already support one of those cloud platforms.
This means that for the duration of the session, you would have full access to all your cloud based files, but nothing you do on that computer would be saved locally, with the exception of USB drives. After you end your session, all the local files would go back to where they were when you started. Translation, even if you downloaded a virus, and trashed all the files on the local disks, they would all go back to where they were when you started. Translation of the translation, let your kids go nuts, they can't screw it up.
Right now, Chromebook's are the only full sized devices that work exclusively in the cloud, but lack many of the programs people are familiar with.
You can get some of the benefits of a cloud only mode hen you enable Guest Mode on a Mac. Anyone using that account is restricted to using only a handful of programs, such as the browser. By using the browser to log in to iCloud.Com, OneDrive.Com or Google Docs, the user can gain access to all their cloud based documents, and even edit them with cloud based versions of Word, Pages, Numbers, Excel, etc. The only problem is the Guest account doesn't have access to most of the Apps on your computer, even if they support iCloud.
Ideally, for a true cloud only experience, everything would link back to a single cloud based login that you would use on any computer in the world that has Cloud Mode turned on. So, to log into a Mac, you would have an Apple ID, and for Windows a Microsoft ID. This would make the computer itself fungible and you would be able to use any Windows PC in the world with your Windows ID as you would have access to any Mac with an Apple ID.
Since nothing is saved locally, you could use a terminal at an airport cafe in NY, then 5 hours later, log into an entirely different terminal at an Internet Cafe in Orlando and you would be exactly where you left off. There are software based ways to make this happen, using virtualization that are commonly used in places that rent time on computers, like in FedEx / Kinkos, but I think this should be built-in to mainstream operating systems.
In fact, I think many people would be better off if this was the default, and they would only log in using a full access account from time to time when they want to install a new program.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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