Hi,Don,

Corollaries:

It was always foolish to trust the only copy of a file to a server that
you do control.

Just because they've put lipstick on the pig and called it "The Cloud"
doesn't mean you can assume it's any different from a server that you
don't control. At some point "The Cloud" has to resolve to a piece of
hardware. We're not shoving data into those puffy white things that
float by, sometimes dropping rain or snow on us.

At it's best, "The Cloud" implies a fault-tolerant distributed system
which can withstand multiple failures and is geographically diverse. I
wonder how many "Cloud" applications are really that well engineered and
managed.

I did not feel comfortable after a tornado devastated downtown Goderich,
Ontario last summer, so in addition to my two RAID 5 NAS units (one in
each of two adjacent houses) for each piece of data, I added a steel
ammo case full of notebook USB drives that get updated about every six
months from the NAS units. These are kept across town (along a
north-south axis as most tornadoes follow an east-west axis).

The remote RAID 5 NAS unit is updated overnight from the local one over
a fibre optic 100 Mb/s link (I'm too cheap to upgrade the media
converters to gigabit), without propagating deletes, and some updates
are not propagated (the theory being it's better to lose the edits than
the original file).

While I feel the pain of the people who lost data, and I'm sorry they
lost data, I do not feel they were being responsible. I do know some
people who rely on "cloud" backup, but if they were informed that their
cloud backup was at risk, I'm certain (or at least I hope) they would
migrate to local backup until they found another cloud. Personally, I am
reasonably comfortable with three copies in three separate locations.

Oh, and the steel ammo can might just protect those little notebook
drives in USB cases from EMP should that scenario ever happen. Now, what
would be left to read the drives???

Cheers,

Richard

On 2012-01-31 9:58 AM, Don Cox wrote:
> It was always foolish to trust the only copy of a file to a server that
> you don't control.
>
--
Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
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