An unsurprising response. I'm not talking about having redundancy vs. not having redundancy. I'm talking about trust. Do you trust those companies? If so, why? Many situations have arisen over the years when services, especially free ones, get canceled on board members' whims. What usually happens is the data goes away without warning. If you had a copy of it, great, but most people don't. But it doesn't stop there. Those servers get rolled out of the datacenter and into a closet somewhere, and then they show up on eBay, GovDeals, or the scrapper on the other side of town who has discovered that most of this hardware is still worth money. THEN who has your data? I've gotten insurance records and payroll data that way. Maybe even yours...but you'd never know it. (For the record: I immediately delete such data using DoD secure deletion guidelines.) So, while the services are still available...do you trust these companies not to do anything untoward with your data? Does that trust extend to every single employee of that organization who has access to the servers? If you're talking about pictures of last weekend's BBQ, that may not be an issue. But what if it's your tax records, or the source code for that software you just got hired to write? Is that trust still rock-solid? If so, why? Some have paid services with contracts that they say protect them from these sorts of things happening. But such contracts don't keep them from happening; they simply provide recourse, usually monetary, and only then if you think you can win in court against an army of corporate attorneys. Either way, the damage is still done. So why do people flock to "the cloud" like moths to a flame? Many people jump on it because they've been told it's "the next great new thing", while in fact pretty much all of it is technology that we've had for 25 years or more. For example...WAN-based file-sharing as some sort of a new thing? Please. One could mount the archives of SunSITE, for example, via NFS over a WAN link in 1993. Sure, we sometimes format the bits differently now, but the premise is nothing new. Other people jump on it because they feel it gives them some advantage. Yours seems to be off-site backups and WAN availability. Great functionality and value. I have those too...on servers that I own and control. Yes, it took some extra work. But I don't store BBQ pictures there, I store material that I generate (which, as such, can't just be "downloaded again" if it disappears) which constitutes my livelihood. I don't trust that to anyone, much less a greedy American corporation. Much of my visceral reaction on this subject is due to the fact that I find both laziness and greed deeply offensive. Most people who use the cloud do so because they're personally lazy; they don't want to set something up or learn how to do it. Most corporations do it because they're greedy; they don't want to shell out money for a proper staff to manage the infrastructure that they need to conduct business. Corporations even get a double greed benefit because employees are very expensive (much more than just their salaries) and they can usually write off the cost of paid cloud services as an operating expense. That's great "look at how much money I saved the company!" fodder for when bonus time comes around, but there are more honorable ways to make money than exposing one's company infrastructure to vulnerability by selling out the control of it. Part of what has made the Internet work since day one is decentralization. Yes, it's harder, but it just plain works better. If those services work for you, more power to you, and good luck. I've been there and done that, and I won't touch them with a ten-foot Cat6 cable. -Dave On 04/19/2017 11:31 AM, Bill Loguidice via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I'd argue instead that the "THE CLOUD!!" is a natural and amazing evolution that everyone should embrace. I use Dropbox (primary), Evernote, OneDrive (secondary), Google Drive (secondary), etc., and have perfect redundancy across a wide range of platforms. Not only do I have all of my data stored locally, but it's also obviously sync'd to the cloud and available both from there and locally on all my other devices that happen to have some type of Internet connection (which these days is pretty much everything). There's also version/revision control and an ability to restore anything that gets accidentally deleted. It's transformed the way that I work from anywhere, at any time, from any device. If any of those services went kaput one day, big deal, I have literally half a dozen or more copies on various devices. And if one of my systems loses a drive or corrupts data, no big deal. There's really no downside there. In fact. this is especially good because most people don't have a backup plan in place. With this, it's near instantaneous backup.
Since this is all automated, there's very little to think about. I personally don't have to manually back up anything because of it. This is all a far cry from using computing devices in the past, where you were one corrupted disk/cassette or drive away from losing everything (and goodness knows I've had that happen to me more than once). I love vintage computers as much as anyone, but that's one thing I'll never miss about them.
======================================================== 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 Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 7:09 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Yes. With people jumping in droves to put everything in/on "THE CLOUD!!", without a thought or a clue as to the consequences, I can't help but sit back and laugh. It's the same centralized model, except that it's, as Matt Patoray so aptly puts it, SOMEONE ELSE'S COMPUTER.
At least the company mainframe was owned by an entity whom you ostensibly had some sort of a connection to.
Oh well. People will learn when all their stuff just up and disappears. And companies will figure out what happens when they store their customer lists and other business-proprietary data on computers owned by some of the world's largest data mining companies. B-)
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA