Back up your online data. Now. (Echoes form Digital Railroad)
Frank ess
David J Taylor
You mean some people actually trusted backups outside their immediate
physical control?
David
jimkramer
news:ffCdnSV3YNRjJ4DU...@giganews.com...
I wish that outcome was even remotely a surprise, but it's not.
Never trust someone to do something that you should be doing yourself.
-Jim
Eric Miller
Well, hopefully, the online data was the backup. Redundancy should,
among other things, account for the failure of any copy. Anything less
isn't really redundant. If people were using that service as the only
storage medium for their digital images, they are the ones to blame for
their own loss.
Eric Miller
www.dyesscreek.com
Noons
> Not that pleasant an outlook:
>
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=607&tag=nl.e540
Anyone stupid enough to believe the "cloud computing"
hype that important data should be stored online only
fully deserves what they'll get...
RichA
let some remote site host the only copies of their work??
P.S. a DVD burner costs $25 and discs are about $0.15.
"Frank ess" <fr...@fshe2fs.com> wrote in message
news:ffCdnSV3YNRjJ4DU...@giganews.com...
Robert Coe
: Not that pleasant an outlook:
:
: http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=607&tag=nl.e540
There was a case a year or two ago in a town in central Massachusetts. A
professional photographer had a little one-man shop in an old factory that had
been converted to a mall. His business was selling prints through galleries; I
don't think he did portraits, weddings, or any sort of paid event photography.
So he depended pretty much exclusively on his large stock of existing
photographs. One night the mall burned down, and the contents of his shop were
totally destroyed. As I recall, most of his work was digital, but he had no
backups of any kind. Sympathetic customers and gallery owners tried to gather
copies of his work to help him recover, but he was effectively wiped out. His
only option was to start over. I don't know whether he had insurance, but
coverage in such cases usually doesn't begin to match one's actual loss.
What's sad is that the whole thing was so totally unnecessary. Digital backups
are tedious and can be time consuming if you don't take the trouble to set up
an efficient workflow. But they're not difficult to do. And most individuals
don't need expensive off-site storage; a mile or two of physical separation
(accomplished by bringing your backup media home from work) covers 99.99% of
cases.
Nobody likes to blame the victim, and in this and the Digital RR case it's
easy to feel sorry for those who lost their pictures. But what ever were they
thinking, not to take reasonable precautions with so much at stake?
Bob
Don Stauffer
The whole idea of online storage and especially online applications is
to me a negation of the idea of the personal computer.
Before I had a personal computer, I had an account on my employer's
online interface, and could check out a terminal. Of course, all I
could work on was my work stuff, for which I had an account.
The whole idea of a personal computer was that it was MINE! I could do
what I wanted with it, no big company overwatching me.
Now, we seem to be going back to the old idea of timeshare accounts,
where your computer just becomes a terminal, though a smart terminal
rather than a dumb one.
If I lose files, it is MY fault. My backup stays on a shelf. Really
important family data I burn to dvds or cds and give copies to my kids.
Alan Browne
Several years ago, an article in Scientific American suggested that
rather than have offline storage at a central location, that all data
should be distributed and storage shared across the globe.
Inspired by distributed computing models (such as the original SETI),
distributed storage would:
- Automatically make 'shard' copies of each data file on your hard disk.
- Encrypt them with a private cypher.
- Send them to share controllers at your ISP
- ... which would randomly select 4 or 5 other networked computers
(other than your own and not on your ISP) to store each shard on.
- Send a key back to your computer for each file. The key would tell
your computer where to find all of the shards as well as assure ownership.
- Computer owners that store shards would receive credit (ISP access, etc.)
- ISP's would in turn charge each account a small amount for each file
stored (outbound).
It is an inflationary system (replication). But the failure of a few
drives does not mean losing the file.
Further with redundant file schemes (rar, etc), chunks of files could go
missing, yet be recoverable.
You would not know (nor care) where the data is stored.
This concept does not seem to have gotten off the ground. But as data
sets grow like crazy and the time needed to manage them is not
available, this is a more and more viable option, IMO.
--
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-- e-meil: Remove FreeLunch.
-- usenet posts from gmail.com and googlemail.com are filtered out.
Colin.D
are as important as the data they point to. Lose your computer, you've
lost all your keys, and with that, access to all your data. That of
course also applies to cloud storage.
Given that keys are itty-bitty files, they can get lost even on a going
computer.
This all means that you have to have a fully redundant off-site backup
system under your control to store your keys, so what's different from
using such a system to backup your data directly? Only storage space,
and that's cheap these days, a couple of terabyte HDs, or several 500 Gb
HDs would be ample in 99.99% of situations.
Ina nutshell, you are no safer with arm's-length storage, since you must
protect the access keys just the same as you would protect the original
data. And, as in the case of this railroad outfit, if the storage goes
down ...
Colin D.
Alan Browne
Then I probably made a mistake in the description and the location keys
are also part of the shard cloud and that you only need password
protected access.
(eg: the proposed system was better thought out than my from-memory
recollection of it).
> Ina nutshell, you are no safer with arm's-length storage, since you must
> protect the access keys just the same as you would protect the original
> data. And, as in the case of this railroad outfit, if the storage goes
> down ...
See above.