There’s an article from one of the authors of the site Lifehacker on how the editors, separated by vast physical distances, work with each other to keep Lifehacker going. Everything they use to collaborate is web-based. Three of the seven tools are from Google. In “cloud computing,” users no longer have their data tied to their local machine. The data is stored up in the “cloud” somewhere, and users can access those documents anywhere there is a network connection. And it’s getting better and better all the time. Aside from Outlook, I hardly use Office anymore because Google Docs takes care of all my word processing/spreadsheet needs (A neat feature that is especially useful in a Google Docs spreadsheet is the ability to pull down live/near-live stock data!).
But there’s a big problem with cloud computing: eventually it rains.
Don’t get me wrong, I love using the cloud. I use Google Docs all the time. Every aspect of my upcoming wedding is in spreadsheets on Google Docs. It’s especially useful when I go back and forth between multiple computers, or multiple operating systems even. Everything is always exactly the same, perpetually available to me.
But what if that company failed? Or decided that Gmail was no longer profitable? What happens to all that data? Like the Lifehacker editors mentioned above, if Google was somehow down or they were locked out of their accounts, or Google just decided to axe Google xyz…work would grind to a standstill. Even worse, do you have a recent backup of the cloud? What is your recourse for getting your data back?
There are all sorts of things that could happen. Companies get bought and sold all the time and you might never be certain who could “own” your data at some point in the future (This is one of my big hangups with Mint.com, which stores your banking username/passwords. They may guarantee the best security possible, never to maliciously use that data, but what if they get bought? That policy may go right out the window, or the new owner could not maintain security standards, etc…).
I’m not sure what I’d do without my del.icio.us bookmarks. I do have all my original photos uploaded to flickr. Twitter isn’t really that important. Facebook does have a lot of data, mainly photos and things. Pretty much all important email I’ve received in the past few years is on Gmail. Google Docs has all my important documents as well.
I’m not sure what the solution to this problem is. There are some improvements, such as Google Docs now has the ability to cache documents to your computer and work on them in offline mode. There are ways out there to back up your Gmail account. There almost needs to be some way to export this data in a format (XML?) that could be used in other programs or even better… other websites. Then we can easily move between providers, and the market has great competition.
So as much as I love using all these products and services, I try to take note of what I’d do without it.
Update: Ironically, I wrote this post last night and this morning I can’t access Google Docs.
Tags: cloudcomputing websites web2.0 cloud access backup