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