Sometimes there are thunderstorms in “The Cloud”

Longtime readers may remember that this blog started and lived about its first nine months on blogger.com, the Google tentacle that wants to fill your blogging needs.  An erroneous, seemingly arbitrary, and obscenely long-lived restriction on my account provided final impetus for me to leave for dedicated space, and BoWilliams.com and I lived happily ever after.

The lesson I took from it is an old one:  free is expensive.  Google was “giving” me everything I needed to blog, so it could certainly take it away too, and what in the world could I say about it that would have any teeth?

That very same blogger.com is still recovering from a large outage.  Every blog owner was (is?) in read-only mode, unable to add new content.  Moreover, some content is likely lost forever.

But hey, they’re Google.  Whaddya gonna do?  You some kinda tough guy?

Aren’t you really, really excited about moving a lot of data that’s critical to your life and business to the cloud?

There are significant swaths of data that will never see the cloud.  Nothing vulnerable to espionage, whether governmental or corporate, is ever going “up there,” and fantasies to the contrary are just that.  There seems to be widespread adoption by individuals for certain things.  I imagine most everyone I know has online photo storage of some kind or another.  I’m playing with an Amazon “Cloud Drive,” because they really-really-wicked-bad-puh-LEEEEEEZE wanted me to have it.

It’s pretty cool, I guess.  But is there anything up there that I don’t also have locally?  Not a chance.  Ditto photo storage.  I don’t anticipate ever feeling differently about that.

There are privacy considerations, of course, but I think societally we’re past the point on that.  Not enough people care.  I think the reliability thing is a bigger fish bone in the throat than cloud advocates realize, however.  With just a bit of preparation and diligence, a properly redundant local storage system almost can’t catastrophically fail.  Now hard drives die, lightning strikes, and so forth, but with a proper backup strategy, that’s a headache, not a heart attack.

What’ll it take for a widespread move to the cloud?  Think 99% reliability would do it?

You know that’s almost four days a year, right?

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