Feet On The Ground, Head In The Clouds

Okay, so I know that my next computer will be a MacBook Air. The new i7 models can take the amount of work I need to do & even the heavier things like Photoshop, so it's finally a viable alternative. The problem is, storage space is tight. In an effort to tidy up my almost full 500GB hard drive, I've been weeding through things & seeing which ones I can live without. Here's the process I've gone/am going through & the solutions & implementing.

Video
I tend to download entire seasons of a show at once, in addition to movies, in addition to new episodes of things we may have missed. This folder fills up quckly. I wanted to be able to still have access to my video without keeping it on my drive, but I needed to be able to access the video from my home network (Xbox & Google TV). Well, I've had a Pogoplug for years, but never really had the opporunity to use it because Time Warner's upstream sucks so much. Fortunately though, now that we have Wideband, the Pogoplug is actually useful. All 140GB of my video is now on my Pogoplug. Pogoplug also lets you stream to game consoles on your network, so my bases were covered. Streaming quality is just fine, so so far so good.

Music
Ok, this is where it gets a bit tricky. Rdio, Spotify, MOG, Grooveshark, and on and on and on. I am and always have been totally anal retentive about how my music is tagged & making sure I have weird B-Sides & imports. There's a solid 15% of my music that isn't available on these services. I don't have much music, but trimming 40GB down will have a big impact. But no, there's no way I can get rid of my music & solely rely on these services, can I? Well, I think I can get halfway there. My plan is to slowly start weeding out the music I have locally that I can be sure I'll be able to find on Rdio (my service of choice) until all I carry on my local storage is the stuff that isn't available, which then is also available on mobile & other machines via Google Music. Of course, I won't be deleting the music, just moving it to the Pogoplug, just in case. This should clear up 30GB of music in the end.

Documents
I've never had terribly lerge files. I use Photoshop & Illustrator now and then, but I don't have to worry much about the things I need to work. Dropbox more than suits my needs and a 256GB drive in a MacBook Air should be more than enough for what I need.

I'm almost done moving things around & I've gone from 20GB available to 70GB available to 140 GB available to today where I have 240 GB available, and that's out of a 500GB drive. (obviously less, after formatting) I still have more to compress & offload, too, so after all is said and done, I should fit well within the constraings of a current gen MacBook Air. Though, by the time I get one, I hope there's a 512 GB drive option!

Have you already started the transition to the cloud? Did you downgrade your local storage? What did you do to make it easier on yourself? Let me know!