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In The Cloud

There’s been a lot of talk recently about “Cloud Computing” and “Software as a Service” (SaaS). The past week I’ve been doing quite a bit to move these ideas along. I guess it was about two months ago that I learned about “Google Docs” where you can store your documents online. It was only a few days ago that I learned my Hotmail account came with 25GB of free storage.
(If you have a current Hotmail account, look for something called "SkyDrive")

I love this kind of stuff. So I have been burning up my Internet circuit trying to upload files to the cloud. I’ve got all my poetry sitting at Google and all my (original) music sitting up in Hotmail. The love will certainly run out if something happens to these files.

There’s a service called Carbonite that you can use to back up files and store them off-site. The price for the service is ridiculously low. In the past few days I heard a story about some of the data being lost. Can you imagine?

Another provider, HP, had a service called “Uline” that I actually recommended to a couple of people. “It’s HP”, I told them “they’re not going anywhere anytime soon”. They shutdown their service sometime earlier in the year. The lesson here: you just never know.

Many years ago before Microsoft had scooped up Hotmail I had my account (the one I still have today). I remember going away on vacation and was checking my mail after I had returned. There were 5 emails in my inbox that I had not read – all other email was gone. All previous messages I had stored were missing and even the folders where I stored them were not there.

I immediately sent off an email to support to see what happened. Every time I did I got back a form letter about their backup procedures. I could ‘buy’ a restore of my data for thousands of dollars but why. I didn’t pay anything when I signed up for the account and I was well within my space limitations – why were they making me feel like I had broken some rule? It left a bitter taste in my mouth but, luckily, I didn’t have anything of major importance saved in the account.

I think that’s the biggest fear about storing files ‘out there’, that the storage provider could mishandle them. I suppose another concern would be the security of the files. Within the past few weeks Google admitted there was a security problem with Google Docs files. They gave full access to files where you had previously only given limited access before. They fixed it by turning off all access.

That doesn’t scare me a whole lot. I mean, I’m not storing files of great national security. If someone gets access to my poetry it’s not going to cause me a great deal of financial problems. I think people forget that magnetic storage is not 100% stable.

I just like being able to do things in the browser so that, no matter where I am, I can reach my files, play a game, or click on a bookmark that I’ve stored. And with all these services being provided for free, I can’t really complain about the price. (technically, this blog is in the cloud).

I like playing with software that programmers have been able to write where you only need a browser to run the program (and not download or install software). There’s talk of doing this with an entire operating system but I’m hesitant about that because I know my Internet connection drops out on me from time to time and I’d hate to not be able to use my computer just because my Internet connection is down.

So while I’d like to talk more people into storing their information in the cloud, I know that it has a downside to it. Like I said, I love it now but I’m going to be really pissed if anything goes wrong with it.

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