I have this friendly argument on a regular basis, though mostly with people in vintage computing/gaming who have more "hardcore" ways of doing things. I know for me, cloud-based services like Dropbox, Evernote, etc., have made my computing life better, more productive, and safer than it ever was in any form in the decades prior. The beauty part with these services is that you have both local- and network-based copies of every file, which means not only do I have access to my stuff in the cloud, but also on every computing device I own. I make one change on one of my computers, the local copy is backed up to the cloud, then it's replicated on any other computer that I have that happens to be on or logged in (at that time or in the future). That also gives me multiple copies of my files I can revert back to, so I have a full revision history should I ever need it. All that, without me doing anything other than working like normal. That to me is the best of all worlds. This way of doing things came in particularly handy within only the past six months, when three of our new household computers went down (requiring in one case an exchange, and in the other two other cases multiple services with HP and Alienware/Dell, respectively). Both my wife and I work from home with our own editorial businesses, so being without our files/access to our stuff is not an option. When one of our computers go down, it's trivial to pick up right where we left on another computer. So yeah, I have nothing bad to say about cloud services. ======================================================== Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade, Inc. <http://www.armchairarcade.com> ======================================================== Authored Books <http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Loguidice/e/B001U7W3YS/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_1> and Film <http://www.armchairarcade.com/film>; About me and other ways to get in touch <http://about.me/billloguidice> ======================================================== On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 1:43 PM Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I don't have a fraction of the IT experience that most of you do. I don't pretend otherwise.
However, as a tech journalist, I've been covering enterprise IT for 20 years. I interview dozens of major corporate CIOs every year.
Pretty much ALL medium/large corporations -- the Fortune 1,000 -- spend thousands or even millions of dollars annually on cloud services/storage.
There are many reasons why they do it. None of those reasons include, "Because they're stupid."
I chuckle a little when I read comments from people who think they know better than all the massive international conglomerates whose budgets fuel the many-billion-dollar cloud computing industry.
On Fri, Nov 30, 2018, 1:22 AM Laura S. Reinhard via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org wrote: