Posted on 01/02/2015 6:34:45 AM PST by SeekAndFind
What little I use cloud storage for has almost zero value except to sell me Willys jeep parts.
Mine is a mutt M38 and CJ5 and prior to ordering some parts, I send a few smartphone photos to the parts house for Willys.
Oh, you’re the AOL customer.
Any data that is truly important to me gets burned to disc and stored.
True. My hospital set up a cloud based service to address a specific thing, and for the vendor to obtain the certification we required was a significant expenditure of time, expertise and money by both us and them.
If not done correctly, just put a gun to your head
There is smugmug that I have had for years. It is mostly a legacy thing now but I like it very much.
No medium lasts forever.
LOL, dogs don’t crap Windows, because they just stay inside and kill the host!
“LOL, dogs don’t crap Windows, because they just stay inside and kill the host!”
Love it!
My lecture to programming students is that Windows is its own virus.
“Oh, you’re the AOL customer.”
No, there are three of us. The other two are MSNBC’s only subscribers.
The cloud is like one stop shopping for the NSA.
“Why anyone uses the cloud is beyond me.”
You kinda have to with these crappy ipads and iphones. Not enough on board storage plus no slot for a micro SD expansion card. Plus the users want to sync all their craptastic tunes across all devices. So they can access Brittany Spears anytime, anywhere.
I store family pics and photography work on cloud storage. I learned the hard way when local primary and slave drives failed.
Relying on local backup is far riskier. For several years, I meticulously backed up my data on a network drive and one morning I discovered that the backup drive failed and everything on it was toast. Fortunately, I was able to recover all my data from cloud storage.
Cloud storage also has the advantage of being accessible whenever you need it. When I'm traveling, I can still access my entire music library and work files, among other things. On a business trip, I once left my laptop at home but was able to borrow one and download everything I needed including the Powerpoint presentation I was to give directly from cloud storage.
Cloud storage is not a fad and it's not going away. However, you do need to be careful where you choose to store that data. Well known and reputable services like Apple iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive yes. Some offshore company offering a cheap rate that you know nothing about, probably not a good idea.
Aol? lol
I knew I should have kept my mouth shut. But I do like it. Only problem is people who may look at my resume will get a feel for my age.
Wait....you use aol internet AND aol mail???? LOL!!!!
Very true, all things have a shelf life. Every so often I pull a few golden oldies and judge if they are worth keeping. I am finding more and more isn’t worth it.
Yeah, I don’t use cloud services to archive anything, but I do have the following backups to my system:
1. Clone of my hard drive to a secondary hard drive in the same computer, which I then dismount.
2. External USB hard drive which I clone, remove, and store in the lock box at the bank.
3.separate hard drive on my computer that is constantly doing interval back ups (this is Apple’s time machine)
I do the cloning of the drives once a month. I’ve lost stated before, and I should know better, but my backups were not good. Now I make sure.
I use cloud services for image hosting and such.
In the early 60s, "the cloud" existed only in the realm of weather reports.
But there was another sinister belief, bordering on dogma. Central computers and batch processing, a yet hidden concept eventually revived as "The Cloud," 50 years later.
A funny thing happened in between. Businesses, specially technical and scientifically oriented individual businesses, adamantly insisted on the eventual control of their own data, for many reasons that should be clearly evident.
With the "Personal Computer" revolution, all bets were off and the computer universe was redefined, and there is no turning back. Central control by the government, or anyone else was rendered impossible. The ultimate liberation.
Along came the internet, the cellular phone system, cheap satellite communications, and wireless communications, and the Monster of Total Control, long thought dead came back to life.
To digress a moment, Jonathan Gruber, among other things, became the reluctant savior of the populace, albeit unconsciously, against the new monster, Central Control of everything by the ultimate threat to Freedom, Central Government Control. There is a general sense of alarm, which previously did not exist.
Gruber, should be Time's Man of the Year.
There is controversy about whether it is possible for communications generally, and the internet specifically, the cellular system and wireless communications, in the macro sense dependent on satellites, to be turned off completely from a central controlling authority. The jury is still out.
All that does is to alarm those who are aware, as to whether the point of no return has been reached, and that we are all helpless to prevent it.
The only glimmer of hope is the existence of (hundreds?) of millions of individually controlled small and large computers distributed world wide. The only threat to those is the voluntary acceptance of "Clouds" the proliferation of which may be arrested by sober reflection of the implication of their threat.
Me?
I don't have data that is critical to anything external to myself. Yet I continue to eschew "clouds" and the perverse impulse for control that it represents.
Of course, cheap gigabites hard drives and arrays may be outlawed as National Security Threats and as individuals we will all be screwed, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Also, I refuse to cooperate with the current trend to make it impossible to BUY useful software, to own it and to maintain full control of it; another manifestation of the "Cloud" monster, and the intended redefinition of software to something "rented and subject to recall" at any time, with the resulting effect of making privately archived data useless.
We do live in interesting times.
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