Tuesday 19 January 2016

Cloud computing sounds risky to me. Am I stuck in the 20th century?

19 January 2016: Twitter went down this morning. Remarkable for such a widely used site. It made me think about cloud computing, and why, despite being on Windows 10, I'm reluctant to store my files in 'the cloud'.

It's a nice idea, but it puts someone else in control of your work. If their servers go down, how good are the backups? Do they exist? What if the whole thing goes down? What if stuff goes missing? What if a virus deletes everything on their server? What if a hacker steals my work?

Call me paranoid, but I like to feel in control of my files. Now in truth, my perceived control might be quite limited. My computer might break. My back up system is rubbish, but unlike Twitter today, my computer has never 'gone down'. It's reliable. It works. My photos are on external drives and when they're about to die, they usually clunk first, giving you a warning, to copy everything onto a new drive quickly! Although I do have a back up of sorts too.

How do other people get on with cloud computing? Do other people think it sounds risky. Am I stuck in the 20th century?

7 comments:

  1. Interesting post, and now I'm worried! Recently updated to a Chromebook and everything lives in the cloud. Might have to think about some kind of backup.

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    1. Well you'd hope Windows 10 cloud is probably pretty good. I just don't know! :-) Hotmail's gone down before. :-) Thanks for the comment.

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  2. Well done you have shared a great post.And of-course cloud computing helps in several ways to writing..Thank you so much for your great post..

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