Inspired by this CNN article about the Impending Demise of the Optical Drive <tm>.
I’m a little leery about this. All our data on the cloud, without physical copy? All our software downloaded, where it can be altered and barred from reinstall on a whim? (I was about to talk about borrowing and used software, but that’s already pretty difficult WITH optical media. I guess I’m stuck in a book mentality.)
This somehow seems very limiting to me. How wrong am I?
A lovely old short SF story, MS Fnd in a Lbry, spoofs the problem: basically, the indices and catalogs for the data end up consuming 99.9% of the overall data capacity – until, one fine day…
I suspect that the good news is that failures will be small and isolated, giving us a good solid statistical sense of the real risk, and that backup strategies will be devised to respond to actual losses. This, of course, means that there will be loss, but, hey, that’s inevitable.
All hail the Sentient Cloud
I don’t distrust the cloud as much as I distrust the availability of the network.
Servers can go down. Just look at what happened to sites hosted with Amazon Web Services during Sandy.
I wouldn’t put everything up there and expect it to stick around forever. It’s always wise to have back-ups, then back-ups of your back-ups, no?
True but individual people are much worse at making reliable backups than cloud storage providers. The key part of the term ‘cloud’ over older models like mainframe central computing is that they are supposed to be mostly geographically independent. The servers are supposed to have failover and instantly redundant capability that allows a server or even a whole data center to go down without the end user even noticing. The data is supposed to be mirrored in widely dispersed locations that are all heavily protected.
I say ‘should’ because it doesn’t always work that way yet. I consult for megacorps who have implemented their own cloud models and have had critical failures that were partially unrecoverable. The model is advancing quickly however and the technology is almost there.
For an average person, keeping your personal documents in a cloud storage medium like Google drive or Amazon is already much safer than keeping it on your home computer and it is much more flexible in terms of access. It never hurts to have local backups and I would advise everyone to do that too. However, moving to the cloud is inevitable and takes some work so start working on it. The benefits and conveniences are already real.
If you combine cloud computing with localized backup, you will get all of the benefits and protection from both and it doesn’t cost much money to implement even for an individual. Sign up for Google docs and buy an external hard drive for less than $100 and build the strategy that ensures your most important documents are available to you anywhere no matter what happens.
This article touched on three different things and then, for some bizarre reason, lumped them all together in “The Cloud is taking over!” hysteria.
Optical discs still have a long shelf-life for things like DVD/Blu-ray movies and console video games. The US doesn’t have the bandwidth capability to move all of that entertainment to streaming or direct download services. This is doubly true with the dawn of “4K” TVs (the first ones rolled off the assembly line last month) and a new generation of consoles scheduled for 2013.
Also, while optical disc support may be dwindling on the PC, portable hard drives and USB drives still have a place for data backup. Those aren’t going away and pretending otherwise just makes you look silly.
The cloud is great. All my stuff is in the cloud.
But all my stuff is also stored locally. If the network’s down, or I forget to update my credit card expiration date and my account is deleted, or some idiot IT guy wipes out a bunch of directories, or whatever, I still have my stuff. This applies to my online backups, email, pictures, and so on.
And of course, if my house burns down or I’m the idiot IT guy or something, my data is still there in the cloud.
Always keep backups, and make sure they are distributed both geographically and by provider. Never have a single point of failure. My most important stuff may be stored in 6 different places.
I’m looking at it from an energy perspective. If I have 100 GB of data, the disks that data are on (at least 2) are running all the time, right? (data centers don’t seem to have power down measures) It’s even harder to power down considering a disk might have 100 users’ data, which might be needed at any time. Seems like a massive use of energy. You only power on your own backups when you need them. Maybe soon they’ll consolidate the most commonly accessed data on some disks, then power down the rest.
This is probably my greater concern. Temporary local or cached storage only goes so far, and there have been times where the line of access to my data was the bigger issue.
That said, I do use cloud services for mostly non-sensitive content, and definitely as a backup for everything else.
In all honesty, most of my physical copies typically end up collecting dust or taking up space. Outside of a few exceptions, an electronic version stored in the cloud makes more practical sense, assuming I have reliable access to it. I’m a large user of Google’s web services, for example, and constantly use other services like Evernote and Dropbox, synced across multiple devices and platforms, so that I don’t have to rely on installing something before use. My information is available anywhere I can get web access (meaning I can both modify or secure/remote wipe it), and this represents a huge advantage.
So far as software installs which I must first download, I don’t really have issue with that either, for similar reasons to the above. Once I install, I have no real use for the physical media, unless my backup or system is damaged/lost. I then have alternatives or other methods for recovery, but don’t see an insistent need for anything physical.
I can understand how it seems limiting, but I think that’s also due in large part to the transitional period of the process. As we shift more towards that direction, there will be lesser concerns and perceived limitations. For example, I still have people who think the best way to send me a large file, is to burn it to a disc-- in return, I give them a downloadable link to my Dropbox, in the same email exchange.
I do not like the cloud. I do not trust the cloud. I will not pay for the cloud.
Cloud bad.
One other reason I am not a fan of “cloud” technology is the trend to move software there - like MS Office and Adobe products (Photoshop/Illustrator/etc.).
Now you don’t buy the product, you more or less rent the product - paying monthly/yearly fees. Granted, you do get upgrades as they are made - no longer have to wait for some new version to come out - but basically you are at their whim if they want to raise the rental price or add/delete some feature. In the “old days” you could buy a version of the software and didn’t necessarily need to get the newest version with useless bells and whistles and could skip several new releases of the product (over several years) before needing or wanting to upgrade.
I will admit that this will make computer hardware cheaper and easier to run. Some of the new computers have no moving parts (they work like your smart phone) so there is no need for a fan or bulky hard drives. This will make for thinner, lighter and perhaps somewhat cheaper, faster hardware. But as mentioned above - when the cloud goes down (and it will at some point for at least some period of time), you are stuck with a useless computer.
I think that optical media’s death knell has been rung a little prematurely.
Fuji has worked out a process for manufacturing terabyte discs which is more cost-effective than manufacturing 50GB Bluray discs.
A bit of cheat, since they are talking about 500GB per side, but even if you’re thinking of it as “only” a 500GB disc, that’s pretty nice - but it still beats the hell out of 25 or 50GB discs.
Personally, I am still using 8.5GB DVD9’s which are at the sweet spot for affordability and capacity. I like to have my stuff somewhere close and secure, and expect that I always will.
Mine too. I just work straight out of my Dropbox folder, so everything I do gets mirrored to the cloud. Besides providing simple backups, it also makes it easier to switch computers if there’s a hardware failure.
The cloud is good for what it is. I keep backups of my music and photos on my gdrive, because Google has processes in place to protect my data that are only cost-effective when applied at a scale that is significantly larger than my hard drive. I keep local backups, but in my mind, the gdrive copy will be persistent through more scenarios than my local backups will (e.g. a fire that destroys my entire apartment).
I don’t get it…okay, so all my stuff is supposed to be on the cloud.
That might be good for backups…but what happens when I want to, ya know, use it?
Things sometimes move sl.o…w…l…y on the internet.
On my home computer, a 3-minute streaming video frequently stalls in the middle.
A 15 minute video is sure to stall once.
Here on the Dope, when somebody posts a link to their kitty pic, I hesitate to click on it, because I know it will take an irritating pause of maybe 15 seconds before it appears on my screen.
(And I have broadband through my cable TV company. There are still millions of Americans in rural areas who have slower connections.)
And with my business software, keeping control is even more important. I bought the program, I customized it for my needs, and I know how to run it. If I were to “rent” it from the cloud, and suddenly Big Evil Software Company changes it, I could lose several days of profitable productivity while I stop serving my customers and re-learn how to use my own computer.
If I’m going to make major changes, I want to do it on my own schedule, not dance to the tune of somebody else.
So --no cloud for me. I’m keeping my stuff on my own property, where I have control over it.
Including my backups.
I send a backup of my backups to the cloud–but I never have any intention of accessing them.The cloud is only good for emergency storage. Like the dehydrated food stored in a survivalist’s atom-bomb shelter. Nice to know that it’s there… but don’t expect to actually use it.
Why no discussion of data privacy on The Cloud? Sure, here’s all my files, which include personal info, I’ll pay you to stick them on a drive somewhere in …where exactly? Where who exactly can access it? Oh, OK, you have a page full of text saying it’s safe safe safe and all I have to do is click on that checkbox to agree. Yeah, sounds good to me! While we’re at it do you want me to send you all of my money so that’s safe too?
There are quite a few legal issues that need to be resolved as well. Recently the FBI took a bunch of drives for an investigation. The problem is that the drives had the suspects data as well as a bunch of other peoples data. The other people are having a hell of a time getting their data back, there are no legal precidents at this time. The FBI is stating that all the data is theirs now, due to the warrant, and everyone else can suck wind.
Slee
It will also be a wake-up when some major cloudware company goes out of business and people discover their programs and files have disappeared.
There’s a security that comes from knowing you have physical possession of something.
Bingo.
I’ll keep everything important on my 1tb drive, thank you. Not like they cost real money these days.