Cloudy future
LoopyByteloose
Posts: 12,537
I just installed a 2Tbyte SATA 6.0 hard disk in my desktop as the primary backup to my world. I just cannot seem to accept the idea that one might trust all his cherished data to storage somewhere on 'The Cloud'.
Other than big corporate IT that can manage their privacy within it, I just don't think I am ready to trust it.
Besides if everyone is forced to buy an iPad or an Android, where can one learn to program and develop their own stuff?
What is your opinion?
Other than big corporate IT that can manage their privacy within it, I just don't think I am ready to trust it.
Besides if everyone is forced to buy an iPad or an Android, where can one learn to program and develop their own stuff?
What is your opinion?
Comments
You will be provide with a selection of Apps to do what you need to do. Why on earth would you want to program your own stuff?!?!?!
Trust us, your information is safe in the Cloud! We'd only mess with it in the case of a National Security Emergency or by Executive Order.
I like cloud for mundane things but don't want to give a server farm complete control of my data for obvious reasons. A data farm like Google will be hacked and if my data is one that is compromised then wow cloud = mess.
Ill keep my life (photos, videos, data) on my server! This way I am in control of its fate not some cheap outsourced data farm.
Executive Orders are just not what they used to be. Look at all the end of presidential term pardons for how the game is played.
-Phil
Personally I don't have boat load of pirated Bittorrent music and video. It takes far too much time to collect and too watch. But the legal environment is very raw and unstable these days.
Meanwhile, Motley Food keeps telling me I should invest now and get in on the ground floor, before it is too late.
Really, "cloud" purveyors are no different from the CompuServes of yesteryears. The costs of a reasonable data "pipe" have fallen and are likely to continue to fall for most of us. Large scale storage is getting cheaper by the byte with multiple redundancies for power, cooling, and the storage itself. You can protect centralized facilities better from natural disaster, terrorism, etc. better than your home or most offices with careful planning. Backup in secure facilities is easier in a specialized center. On the other hand, someone has to pay the bills and no one in the "cloud" business is talking much about security from government snooping legal and illegal when the NSA is tapping the Internet and some very large corporations who should know better are having their databases hacked.
The laptops in my household are backed up to a local networked 1T hard disk. They're also backed up periodically (at least monthly) to two duplicate 500MB hard disks. I use iCloud for my iPad and iPhone backups, but almost all of the data is already on one laptop and gets backed up locally with everything else. I use Dropbox to share some files with the iPad and iPhone, but, like with the iPad and iPhone, they're copies of files already on one laptop.
Bottom line ... If the price is right and you've got a big enough data "hose" for your needs, by all means use the "cloud" where convenient. Don't store anything there that's confidential without using your own encryption and don't count on the "cloud" to be there when you need it. It probably will be, but have a "Plan B". If you've got a business application involved, make sure you get a good lawyer to go over the service contract with you to point out the loopholes. They will be there ... it's the nature of the game. It doesn't mean that using the "cloud" is a problem, just that you need to understand where there are limits and plan for them.
Your analysis and comparison to the mainframe world is funny. We ar of course jumping into the clouds at my day job and many of us elder statesmen are chuckling as the discussion turn to topics and problems that were discussed and resolved 20 years ago in the mainframe world. My past experience is once again useful!!
But hardware is cool and cheap these days!
@Bits - Yeah, hardware is cool and cheap, but give yourself credit for the work involved in purchasing it, maintaining it, and doing proper backups. As the world turns ... you'll need to replace it periodically, so you need to amortize the purchase price over the effective lifetime of the hardware. Blinky lights are getting harder to find. Wouldn't you like a living room decoration like the 4th photo down on this webpage?
If you have tons of data to be shared with tons of users, put it on the cloud.
If you have sensitive data the must be protected, don't put it on the cloud.
Evaluate everything in between on a case by case basis.
Incidentally, I save tons of money and effort by NOT backing up everything. The few things that are valuable are redundant copied on disks and USB drives etc as each new technology become available. Nearly everything else can be downloaded and re-created easily from the net. When windows slows down, I reformat and reinstall. It much quicker than diagnosing some unfixable windows issue, and blows away all the crapware. I always lose tons garbage, but so far have not lost anything valuable.
Recently I installed Chrome O/S on virtual box. It runs slow as a pig, but it has a nice browser interface. Doubt I'll be buying a ChromeBook.
NO FAIR!!! You had a TERMINAL??? :frown:
Well I had to use a teletype in 1982 on Diego Garcia BIOT. It rained every day at 3PM in the summer - very cloudy
There is local storage and there are servers. That's it.
Cloud is simply a question of whose servers. Some of us run local clouds, some of us utilize remote clouds. Some clouds we own, some clouds we don't.
What it all comes down to is cost and or control / flexibility. Local clouds that we build and own are generally low dollar cost, though they could easily be very expensive in terms of time. They are very flexible too. On the other extreme, tapping into a remote cloud that somebody else owns could be cheap in terms of time, but very expensive in terms of dollars.
Best fit depends on one's supply of dollars and time expectations.
For backups, I've always done a three tier system. Local storage, server storage, remote server storage. This is augmented by a cheap external disk or two that gets used as a snapshot. Do the snapshot, then store the thing for later. If there is danger, or something gets really lost, it's likely in the snapshots. Mount them, get it, return snapshot to storage. Ideally, off site storage.
I took down my personal cloud on my last move. Just didn't want to maintain it at all. Didn't see enough value in doing that. Moved to virtual machines for some of the things "the bunker" did, and it's all laptops now. I like to run one good one for work / play, and a few used, older ones for various dedicated things. In terms of dollars, it went up doing this, but in time terms, it's much cheaper.
The first real cloud service I used was Google. Love it. Gmail and the various services for docs and things is just great. It works, I can get data out (and I do from time to time for that snapshot), it's cheap, and it's no hassle.
Professionally, I moved many things to basic cloud services, keeping only a couple of virtual servers. That has worked out very well, with some cost / expectation misalignment happening. Overall, time cheap, dollar marginal. Have had to change vendors a time or two, and am not too pleased with that. However, basic admin foot print and user flexibility went way up. All in all, I'm pleased by that. It is a good deal for small firms, under 20 people. For larger ones, I would still build up a local cloud and deliver the services on stuff the business owns.
Files stored on my local hard drive is also copied to cloud.
And when I turn on my home computer is automaticly downloaded (e.g synced)
Nothing to click or drag&drop or email myself.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/essentials-other-programs?T1=t4
Peter
-Phil
Wasn't it Linus who said others will back up your code? True that. If the code doesn't really matter, it will fade away; otherwise, somebody has it.
My first experience of computing was hammering out code on a teletype in a technical school in the south of England connected to some computer in the north. Manchester I think it was. Circa 1974.
We dreamed of having our own machines at home.
My company also uses a cloud service for tracking calibration and certification data and offering certification certificates to our customers. That is a sensible thing because it's not really sensitive data and it's meant to be available to certain individuals and regulatory authorities.
But for personal data such as a music or photo collection or business data such as our ERP system -- NO WAY. Data is too easily stolen or declared "in violation" by people who haven't even looked at the file. I am also totally creeped out by "services" like Facebook and even linkedIn that record every little thing you do. "Oh, you clicked on a link to a notorious bondage porn site last Thursday, Mr. Burns would like to have a word with you." Maybe I'm just interested in entomology, OK?
We were lucky to have an IBM "Golf Ball" terminal at our high school in 1972, connected to the local University. Afterwords, I had Teletype ASR33 on my ALTAIR in 1975.
I missed that IBM.
Jim