Adam Ponders a Future in the Clouds on the Tech Night Owl Live
A discussion with Tech Night Owl host Gene Steinberg about Apple’s missteps in 2010 somehow segued into far-ranging speculation about how Apple could radically improve the Mac and iOS experience with cloud-based storage and syncing of common files.
I for one don't like the idea of keeping my data in the cloud. Who really knows who is honorable and trustworthy regarding our data?
It's a totally valid point, but it's also worth keeping in mind that a vast amount of data about you is already available to advertisers and governments, so it's not as though we're starting from a point where there's an assumption of privacy.
The important question is whether or not Apple or other cloud-based firms will provide enough of a benefit to outweigh any disadvantages. For instance, Dropbox has been a huge book to the production of Take Control ebooks, and since all books are meant t be public in the end anyway, we couldn't care less about the data existing on Dropbox's servers. And although CrashPlan backs up everything on our Macs, it compresses and encrypts everything before transmitting it, so it's never readable on the other end.
Yes Adam. But what about the admin's of DropBox or similar services? How trustworthy are they? For me, I prefer having my data backed up locally. As Leo says, two here and one off-site, like on a USB stick in a Safety Deposit box, or, something similar.
Just my 2¢
It's all a personal decision, but you have to remember that you have to trust someone, no matter what. If you're doing everything, you have to trust that you will never make a mistake or fail to do the backups on time, or fail to follow your own policies. We all trust other people to do things better or more reliably than we can do them ourselves in other parts of our lives, and backup is no different.
I'd point out that dropbox is off site, and that all of the dropbox files also exist on your own computer, so John, that is your off-site portion of your backups.
But you shouldn't really rely on Dropbox as an off-site backup solution, because those files can be erased automatically as they hit Dropbox's version limit, or simply because Dropbox isn't styling itself as a backup service that guarantees to protect files.
Those extra copies provide peace of mind, certainly, but not in comparison to something like CrashPlan.