How do you feel about backing up your computer data in the Cloud? Basically, we’re talking about using someone else’s servers as a gigantic external hard drive for your data storage.
One of the guys in my business group, a PC tech, urges friends to use Carbonite, a service that offers unlimited backup capacity (“no limits on your backup storage space”!), a powerful encryption program, and ongoing automatic backup, all for $55 a year. That seems amazingly cheap for unlimited storage.
Just now I’m using Apple’s ME.com, which puts an icon in Finder that effectively works as an external drive. It gives you 20GB of space (you can upgrade, if you can afford it), you can use it to back up data from mobile devices, and you get MacMail with it. Annual cost is $99, which is kinda high…but on the other hand, I’m not getting rid of my years-old mac.com address, because so many of my friends and business acquaintances have it. I’d lose a lot of contacts if I dumped the e-mail now, and so in effect the 20 gigs of storage in the cloud comes with the overpriced mail system. Although it can synch all your devices and allow you to access your Mac from a remote computer, as far as I can tell ME.com does not have an automatic backup feature. Uploading an entire directory can be excruciatingly slow. However, backing up just a file or two is fast and simple.
Apple also provides a system called “Time Machine” with an automatic backup feature, but as far as I can tell, it only backs up files to a hard drive; apparently it doesn’t yet talk to ME.com.
Backing up your data to the Cloud has a lot of advantages, the main one being that when the burglar steals all your computer gear or the house burns down and melts your desktop, your laptop, and your external drive your data will be safe somewhere else. Because it’s “out there” with the Truth, you can access the stuff from any computer, so you don’t have to carry a flash drive or hard drive around with you. And as we know, all hard drives eventually fail, whether external or internal; moving data to the cloud lowers the probability that you’ll lose data in a hardware crash.
On the other hand, IMHO relying on someone else’s servers is a bit scary. I’m not real confident about any of these outfits’ hacker-proofness. Carbonite encrypts your data so thoroughly that if you lose your password, you’re SOL, because no one there can recover a password. ME.com is protected only by whatever password you cook up. As we know, no matter arcane you try to be, passwords can be highly vulnerable.
What do you think about the advantages and trade-offs of backing up data to the Cloud? And if you’re storing your backups online, what system are you using?
Image: Hard Disk. Alpha six from Germany. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Interesting question. I think your evaluation of the pros and cons is sensible, but I also think that in the end this decision often turns to a large degree on personality type. It strikes me as much like the basic premise in investment choices–What is your level of risk tolerance? There’s no right or wrong answer; it is what you have, what you want it to do, and what level of risk you can tolerate.
There is no way in H-E-double toothpicks that I’m going to store my personal information in “the cloud.” It just ain’t going to happen! Time has shown us that pretty much anything can be hacked; and, given enough time, it will be. I find it truly funny that if you lose your password you are SOL, but your information will still be out there available to some hacker….
I do not have the quantity or complexity of data to store that you have and in your shoes I *might* make a different decision, but at the moment I am very happy with my external hard drive and Time Machine. Critical things periodically go on backup DVDs stored separately. Even $55 a year would be a waste of money to me. In three years I haven’t filled one 500GB hard drive and that $165 would have bought me one with 2TBs for reserve if I was worried.