I will start this post by stating that I am a huge advocate of cloud computing, until recently almost all facets were a must use. I have been on the cloud computing bandwagon for quite some time now. However, let me take a step back and describe what I consider to be the two types of cloud computing. The first would be cloud services that many of us have become so accustomed to using like Gmail, Flickr, and a long list of others. The other would be cloud computing platforms allowing on demand computing on cloud infrastructure like Ec2 by Amazon and GoGrid among a bevy of others popping up recently.
However, I have recently been rethinking my position on the former, the “cloud” services like Gmail and the like. It started when I heard some of those internet horror stories where users were locked out of their Gmail accounts and had basically lost years of mail. Up until that point I had exclusively used the web interface. At that point I began using Thunderbird as an email client on my Mac. By configuring as IMAP I was essentially able to utilize my Gmail account and have it synchronized with the web interface and at the same time have a local copy on my laptop.
So as far as my email goes, I have a “backup” plan for my email, but what about some of my other items I have out there in the cloud, pictures and documents.. I use Flickr for my pics and would frankly be upset if Yahoo were to kill the service, although most of my pics are not only locally on my desktop but also back up to a Drobo and out on Amazon S3. Documents on the other hand are a different story. I use Google Docs exclusively for all my personal and business documents. As of now, I have not found a good way to “back” these documents up. Users are able to individually export documents and save them to their local computer, but for those who have a large number this is not really a viable option.
With all of this in mind, another shock was sent just the other day when the social bookmarking site Magnolia announced
Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 31st, Ma.gnolia experienced every web service’s worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members’ bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can’t provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours.
Users lost all of their data with no recovery options given.
So is this to say that these cloud service should not be used ? Absolutely not. What it does say though is that you should be aware of the risks and make sure tat you cover all yor bases to make sure you have protected your data.
