> What's the advantage of having the server and data on some device other than the one I'm using to interact with it? Mostly that many people have more than 1

> What's the advantage of having the server and data on some device other than the one I'm using to interact with it? Mostly that many people have more than 1 computer these days: a small one that just about fits in the palm of their hand, and a larger one that stays in a room. This means that most people are instantly operating within the realm of "distributed computing", and one of the fundamental approaches to that sort of thing is to allow one of the computers to both provide and accept data to/from the other. Of course, if you have an application that will only ever be used on a single computing device, and whose data has no utility anywhere else, there's no need for the data to be able to move to/from a server. Such applications do exist, but so do many, many more where the ability to view and modify the data on different devices in different locations is desirable, even when there's just a single user involved.