A lot has changed since July of this year and since I wrote my previous post about the personal cloud experiment. In fact a lot of credit goes to Google and the updates they have made to their products, they have now become my cloud vendor of choice! I am in the process of moving all of my family's files to Google (docs and picasa) and I am using Google Docs as my "hard drive" for all work and personal files. I do not use Docs for editing files as these on-line apps are not ready yet for serious content creation - I still rely on OpenOffice for that. This will change I am sure as Docs is getting close to having pretty decent functionality. After testing all this for a few months I have learned a few things about the cloud that I wanted to share: 1. Google is right and file "syncing" products like Dropbox, box.net, Ubuntu One etc. are not the way of the future. I like the fact that when I "drop" a file into Google docs it is there almost instantly and I do not have to wait to "sync" anything. I move between several computers and tablets throughout my day and it was a pain to wait until all the syncing was done with these other products. I had to change my habits a bit and now I download files to local storage which I need to work on offline. But this is rare and happens mainly when I am boarding long international flights that do not have internet connectivity. 2. Your files in the cloud need to be backed up! Yes, even though Google has some of the best redundancy systems in the world they can't protect you from human errors, account deletion etc. This is why I recommend either backing up to a local server (not popular with pure "cloud" geeks) or even better yet, use a backup solution that puts the files on a different cloud storage provider. There is a growing list of options out there to do that. My current "solution list" for using the cloud looks as follows: 1. Document storage: Google Docs (storage only, best prices on the web!) 2. Pictures and family videos: Google Picasa Web (I am still experimenting and wandering if Docs would not be better) 3. Music: Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player 4. My HD movie collection: Still on a home server! We still can't stream this :-( 5. Cloud backup solution: Considering Spanning Backup. They are from Austin and back-up your data to a different cloud provider then Google. Stay tuned as this story evolves... |
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Update to the Personal Cloud Story...posted Dec 5, 2011 12:37 PM by Paul Zukowski |