Flickr. Diigo. Evernote.
Everybody wants me to work on my machine but then synchronize my data to their site for safekeeping and social functions. I can understand this for situations where I want others to see my photos or my links, but what happens when I have ten or twenty of these services, all of which have separate interfaces, separate logins, separate passwords, and separate liklihoods to still be around in 5 years?
Unless I explicitly want to use their sites as places that others will visit to see my information, I want to store that data on my own site. That will still allow it to be accessed from anywhere when I have Internet connectivity, but I don’t need to worry about the services themselves just vanishing.
Yes, perhaps those sites have backups, but I can deal with a single backup for my one site. Also, I want the information available in a standard format. If one is not available, at least use XML.
I understand this might cause some business model issues with advertising or premium services. Indeed, if I use their software but use my site as the repository, it opens up security risks as well. Nevertheless, my controlling my data and having it available in standard formats will make me sleep better at night.
What do you think?
I couldn’t agree more even though I use Google Docs and Amazon’s S3, and FlickR myself. However that being said even our own data centers cannot guarantee that we will be able to resurrect all of our data in accessible formats. How can we we guarantee that even ODF will be readable 5 or 25 years from now. What about file formats we take for granted like JPG, PNG and TIFF. ASCII has been around and will continue for the foreseeable future. In K-12 education there is a movement toward portfolios, but how can we guarantee that information even when stored in our own data centers will be readable and accessible 25 to 50 years from now.
I’ve become more concerned with this myself recently. It just struck me how many of these services I have and how much data they have. I tried to consolidate my internet presence somewhat, a futile effort to be sure but I thought I’d try. I tried to close down accounts on services I don’t use as well as I didn’t like having orphaned public profiles lying around with my name on them. For a lot of services though they offer no option for this.
This is my bigger concern. I’m happy to store my data on other sites but I want some guarantees and the ability to export and delete my data.
It’s storing it only in the cloud that I just don’t get.
A local USB HD is cheap, and will easily match whatever storage you get in the cloud. Backup!
I would also agree with Don Watkins’ assessment that in future we may have difficulty reading the data anyway. This is another good reason for having decent local backups – you can keep moving them onto a new device, and in the process you can make sure you’re still able to open them.
If you buy a new PC that can’t open them, you’re more likely to find out soon if you have the data locally. Then you can (hopefully) make changes on a machine that can still read the data, with less pain and hassle than finding out years later when you try to pull an old file from the cloud.
If you care about the data, then the cloud should be for distribution only.