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[oftendistracted]

In more interesting news: this weekend, Flickr suddenly highlighted the problems of relying on cloud storage for your files. A photoblogger who'd used the service for five years, sticking about four thousand photos on there, informed Flickr about someone plagiarising his work and passing it off as their own. In response, Flickr accidentally killed

Comments

[mc_valya]

THANK YOU. It's things like this that really give me very little faith in cloud storage, except for services that do keep files stored on your computer (like Dropbox).

[oftendistracted]

I think Dropbox possibly has its own problems. I've signed up for it but never actually tried it out - couldn't you theoretically end up with your files on x machines, all of which might have different versions?

[mc_valya]

My experience with it so far is that as long as you keep a certain file in the designated Dropbox folder, it will sync automatically across all machines connected to your account so long as they're all connected to the internet-- and if that's not the case, then it'll wait until whichever machines aren't connected are. Like, if I update a file in my Dropbox folder on my main laptop, but my netbook is shut down, then it'll sync to the cloud, but wait until my netbook is totally on and connected to sync there. if that makes sense?

I find it useful as hell, since I take notes for classes and occasionally write stuff on my netbook, and having a sync capability like this means I don't have to constantly hassle with thumbdrives. I do keep "backup" versions of my files in my regular document folders, though, just in case.

[oftendistracted]

... right, that makes more sense. For some reason, I was getting stuck on the idea of having multiple computers that were notable distances apart and that could potentially desync - something much wider-scale, like a series of national business centres. I guess if anyone's using Dropbox for that they're just asking for it... but then I can't think of many other options even at that scale, right now.

[robowolf]

And this is why I've never liked the idea of cloud storage, at least not as an only storage. Gimme an external hard drive any day.

[sobrique]

Do you back up your external hard drive? The company I work for provides storage as a service. We'll sell you 'space' by the gig. It will be expensive, because it comes with resilience, all the way down the line, snapshot copies and backups.
It's as robust as you would expect for a business grade service, but that resilience doesn't come cheap. You will pay considerably more per TB than you would external drives, but ... well, that's what it costs.

To have a free service that does the same, is really very optimistic. I'm surprised they take backups at all, actually - tapes are probably more expensive than disks these days, even if you start applying compression and de-duplication, you end up with ... well, overhead proportionate to the degree of resilience you're looking for.

[robowolf]

...not gonna lie, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. I'm just talking about backing up for my own personal use, not for anything like a company or a blog.

[sobrique]

So you're comparing something you buy to store data, with something that's free, and we're commenting that the 'free' service isn't as good.

I'm not sure that's much of a surprise.

[ehrine]

One thing of note you've missed in this is that he did have a local copy of all the photos. The issue was that he _couldn't_ backup the metadata (url's and comments) of the photos. Having to go through all his blogs and relink all the photos would have proved practically impossible and losing the comments annoying as hell.

The bit that annoys me in all this is Flickr claiming it was "impossible" to restore all the data. A statement that was then disproved when suddenly they got hit by lots of bad press. If he'd not managed to get that coverage (and been an ordinary Joe Bloggs) nothing would have happened.

Beyond that, it shouldn't be possible to accidently delete the wrong account in a way that is unrecoverable. The biggest cause of data loss is human error. Even if their policies allow for deletion without suspension first (which is silly IMO), not having a "behind the scenes" suspension so in case of error/appeal it can just be restored is the height of foolishness.

[oftendistracted]

I think the issue that I have with it is one of extrapolation. Say we do all magically somehow move to cloud storage - that's a whole fuckton of backups to keep, especially given that the amount of data we (as a general 'we') use is growing. At some point you're going to have the situation that backups are going to be a very sizable cut into your running costs, and then there's going to be skimping.

There's also the issue of external companies then quite literally knowing everything you're working on, with the business and legal implications that carries, and the issue that already exists on facebook, flickr, etc of 'what happens when I hit delete on my own photos?'.

[sobrique]

If you're paying for a service that includes service guarantees, then you have every right to expect control over your data. In line with the contract you signed.

Use a hosted server/service.... you've the exact same problem - you don't have physical access to the drive, so nothing stops them from declaring it 'mine' barring legal agreements.

*shrug*. Facebook's policy is pretty crap, but that's as much down to their business model as anything else. Same with most of the other free services.

[oftendistracted]

Right, but my point is that at present, there are absolutely no global standards for how to deal with data storage contracts, how to handle matters of privacy and retention, or how best to include failsafes for recovery. It's true that there are companies that do have standards for these things but it's far from a cloud'd-up world... which is counter to the Google / evangelist argument that we're already practically there.

[sobrique]

This is not a new problem, and is nothing at all to do with 'cloud'. It's everything to do with hosted services and storage - things like web mail are not new services, and it's only our assumption that service providers will continue to supply/recover the data in the event of a failure. I'd be prepared to bet most of the usage agreements on ... all the free services out there contain a 'yah boo, we take no responsibility'
You get what you pay for. Pay for corporate cloud services, with SLAs and I'll guarantee you you'll get something more robust.

[dmlou]

It's funny you should post this today. I had a similar post on my blog too about my cloud computing skepticism: http://blog.tealstudios.com/2011/02/07/am-i-luddite-cloud-computing/

Anyway, I really don't trust the cloud all that much as primary storage. As a secondary backup site, sure, but I also keep a local external hard drive with backups on it as well, just in case...

[sobrique]

As you point out, 'cloud' is really nothing new. It's re-inventing the mainframe