Why I’ve happily got my head in the cloud

Hard drives are generally very reliable and what do you think “cloud” storage providers use?

Sorry but it’ll be a long while before I store my treasured photos and personal correspondence on a hard drive in foreign country over which I have no control.

The cloud is a boon to my group. Files are safe and be viewed and edited by any of us on any of our computers. All of our stuff is text: as a result we can store everything in less than the limit of free space. All our file storage is thus free!

my group is glad of the cloud – we exchange files a lot; keeping them in the cloud saves us doing this. Of course we all keep back-up copies of the cloud content. All of our stuff is ‘text’: this means we can get everything into the cloud without going over the space limit and incuring charges. Great!

I started life designing disk controllers and computers and in my experience it is not IF but WHEN something fails – its natures way! I too am concerned about the security and availability of someone’s cloud facility.

So I use Sky Drive to store teaching materials and to give shared access to selected people to chosen uploaded photo’s. I use Dropbox to share stuff between the family. And finally I use a Synology NAS which gives us an in-house Cloud Station (running on 2x2Tb green disks in Raid 1 mode) so we are independent of anyone else’s hardware and even the internet – though I would miss it.
As to why, it is because it took two years (spare time) digitising just some of my slides and negatives and together with the digital photos they amount to several tens of GB. So I store them on two separate disks within the computer and on a USB disk kept in a fire safe (and a DVD copy too). And they are backed up to the NAS and available via the Synology DLNA server so we can view them in comfort on the TV. Its probably overkill but it was fun working it out.

If you really are worried about online security, go for a TNO (Trust No One) architecture. You specify a security key, and only the person who enters that key can unlock it. I’ve been using Carbonite for my online backups for several years. The annual cost is roughly £40, which gives you unlimited space. Only I can access my data using my password as it is not stored anywhere. Without the password, the cloud data is just noise.

The problem is that you lose functionality doing this. The easy thing about skydrive, google drive, dropbox, etc is that you can access them much more easily from within your OS. As they store your password, in theory they can be hacked or coerced into sharing it, so your data is theoretically less secure. So you trade off security for functionality. I use these for sharing files with others – dropbox for my family and skydrive for running a club – stuff I’d share anyway.

I also backup daily to my PC and weekly to DVD. It takes no effort once the backup plan is in place (apart from changing the DVD every week!), but it gives extra peace of mind. You have to think what would happen if I lost all my files – photos, emails, critical documents.

The cloud has made my life so much simpler. I recently discovered a service called Grepolis – a great big filing cabinet-c*m-notebook in the sky. I can scan important documents to it – invoices, insurances, bank statements, contracts, passport details & co, take screen clippings from any webpage through a Grepo button added to my browser, compile a shopping list as I run out of things in the kitchen, keep favourite recipes and have all these notes immediately synched between my PC, laptop, tablet and smartphone. I shop with my mobile clipped to the Waitrose trolley (using the handy checkboxes to tick off items as they go in the basket), rifle through photos and press cuttings when writing a magazine article, and when I want to check what my water rates are I can do a simple search for ‘water’ in my money notebook to bring up the latest payments that went through my bank account. (You can do global searches of your files, search notebooks within those or individual notes.) I can import spreadsheets, word processed files and databases and store them as individual notes with tags.

I can add up to 60Mb a month of stuff for free without any limit on the sum total of my account. (There are premium accounts for people who need to add more in a short period.)

It has simply been life changing.

Forgive the asterisks above. I tried to type the Latin for ‘with’!!!