Together is "nice"--but yesterday's news. Look skyward for the answers. - jtice

I can see how you could have quite a bit of confidence in 'the cloud' within certain self-contained environments, such as corporations and universities, where you know beyond any reasonable doubt that your data is safe and secure. But to me it just seems absurd to trust irreplaceable data, that may represent years or decades, to some unknown server somewhere owned by a small software company that could have the doors chained shut by creditors or have the data stolen by hackers or employees. It may well be the way of the future, but right now I like knowing my data behind a firewall that I control, backed up to multiple drives that I own, and essentially invisible to anyone else. Electronic data is by nature elusive and temporary––if you want a document to have high prospects of being readable in twenty years or a thousand years... make sure it's backed up on paper.

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Wednesday, November 26 2008 @ 08:22 PM PST

Together is "nice"--but yesterday's news. Look skyward for the answers. - Evanitude

@jtice, @sjk

I take your points. Mostly, I agree. I, too, have multiple copies of my irreplaceable data on multiple drives behind a firewall. This is to mean that I have data in the cloud, which is to say, each storage company HAS multiple, safe-room sites, AND that I use multiple, sometimes free, storage sites AND I have multiple storage media on-site. I can't help but remember the recent California wildfires. People risked life and limb to return to burning homes to retrieve sometimes money, sometimes jewelry, but almost always, to retrieve photographs, hardcopy or digital. Diversification is always a good rule to follow. This said, I DO have a lot of faith in professional media storage companies to safeguard my data properly. Safe locations, safe rooms, controlled environments, redundancy, and multiple sites (and sometimes at no cost to the user) would seem a sensible way to go.

Evan Mitchell Stark PhD

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Saturday, February 07 2009 @ 11:25 AM PST