How Much Do You Trust The “Cloud”?
February 7, 2009 – 2:50 pm | by Daryl TayAlthough I have a great love for Evernote, the loss of I Want Sandy is still fresh in my mind. Combine that with Wired’s report that Ma.gnolia suffered major data loss that was referred to as “catastrophic” and the closure of Google Notebook, one can’t help but wonder how safe it is to keep items in the “cloud”.
But… You didn’t pay for it!
This seems to be a recurring comment when such applications die. We didn’t pay for Sandy or Notebook, why should we be upset that they’re gone? Perhaps the internet has fundamentally changed the way we think of consumption. Just because we don’t contribute directly to Google or MSN or Facebook when we use Gmail or Live Messenger, doesn’t mean we’re not contributing at all. Without the network effect of many users congregating around a certain service, where would the ad dollars be?
On the flip side, just because you paid for a service, doesn’t mean it won’t go under. It happens in the physical world, the online world is no different.
Portability
When Google Notebook announced it would be discontinuing support for the service, Evernote quickly rose to the occasion to provide easy exporting of users’ Notebooks to Evernote. Perhaps the issue of service shuttering wouldn’t be as tragic if such movements were the norm, but what do you do when your data is lost, as in the case of Ma.gnolia? How often do you want to do a sync between Google Bookmarks, Delicious and Ma.gnolia? Especially considering their ways of tagging bookmarks are different? Is there a need for a common “standard”?
Looking forward
I feel a little more comfortable with companies like Google and Evernote because unlike Sandy which was a one man team, they’re actual companies with a team or teams of people. But that doesn’t put my mind totally at ease that one day, a cloud service I rely heavily on will lose stuff of extreme value to me, and I would have no idea what to do next.
What are you doing to safeguard yourself from such an occurrence? What would you do if Gmail lost half your emails? If Remember The Milk lost all reminders more than a month into the future? What if your videos chronicling your life over the last six months disappeared on Vimeo or YouTube? Do you avoid such situations entirely by still relying on paper and/or a local hard disk?
Tags: catastrophic, data loss, delicious, evernote, facebook, gmail, google notebook, i want sandy, live messenger, magnolia, msn, portability, remember the milk, safety of keeping data in the cloud, vimeo, wired, youtube
4 Responses to “How Much Do You Trust The “Cloud”?”
By Dor on Feb 9, 2009 | Reply
Hey Daryl,
In response to your title question… I don’t! It’s just a backup..sometimes a backup of a backup.
Sure, I’d definitely trust the Google guys more than some random start up, but like you said, technology is never infallible.
On that note, I would probably freak out more if FB lost our privacy settings or something, like how they ‘lost’ the apps email notification settings a few months back.
p.s I am not quite sold on Evernote yet. haha. But your glowing review made me check it out. Dropbox seems a much cooler concept, need to explore it more, so thx for sharing that! (:
By Walter on Feb 9, 2009 | Reply
Hey Daryl,
Glad to see that you are pretty regular and prolific here! I take a rather philosophical view of things, even though I do have tonnes of content online. Life is ephemeral and transient at best, and what’s most important are the memories etched into that greatest social media machine of all – the mind. Should blogger, gmail, youtube, facebook or flickr fail one day, I’d probably just scream, get severely drunk, dress myself in sack cloth for a day, and thereafter get back to life as normal.
By Jonathan Wong on Feb 9, 2009 | Reply
I think I wrote a comment about this last time on your blog, but essentially it is still about a trade-off between risk and convenience.
Here is a hypothetical: if Google flat out came out today and said that every month, 1 out of every 10000 free Gmail accounts will be deleted just for the heck of it, would you accept that risk (0.01%) and continue enjoying the rich experience and convenience that Gmail provides? Personally, I still would.
Essentially, whenever you use a cloud service, you need to make trade-offs like these all the time.
The best you can do to protect yourself is make sure that you have backups of all your valuable content offline or at least in multiple online locations. For example, all my presentations, video, and photos are stored in my NAS at home and backed up on my desktop. All my contacts in Gmail are backed up on my iPhone. My entire blog database is backed up in my Gmail, etc.
Unfortunately, the only way you can get peace of mind using a cloud service is if you pay for it, and in return you receive a SLA from the vendor. This way, at least if things screw up, you are entitled to some form of compensation.
By Daryl Tay on Feb 11, 2009 | Reply
@Dor: I guess if usage were just backup, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But many times the cloud app is more convenient than the non-cloud alternative, and it doesn’t make sense to keep updating both! (I’m thinking of pen and paper vs Evernote, emailing docs vs Google Docs). Dropbox = coolness. But very different usage from Evernote! Dropbox is more about syncing files, Everenote is about literally having a “second brain”
@Walter: I like that. I’ll definitely include the drinking in my “crisis plan”
@Jonathan Wong: Yup definitely. I would take that risk, but I would equally pay a reasonable amount to get rid of that risk. I guess my point is that if the “cloud” companies want to convince us that using the “cloud” is the way to go, there is lots of convincing yet to go, even for the huge cloud enthusiasts like me.