Your life is in your data. Own it.

January 31st, 2009 Chris
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I’ve been using google documents a lot lately, as I like the convenience of being able to close a document at work, then come back home and pick up right where I left off after dinner. It’s got me thinking about this new fangled idea that our digital lives should live in the cloud, though.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my gmail. I just worry that people have no qualms about entrusting their important data exclusively to third parties anymore. Three illustrative stories:

  1. Ma.gnolia, host to the online bookmarks of tens of thousands of people, suffers massive “data corruption and loss”. The end result is that many people have to start from scratch.
  2. A gmail user wakes up one day to find that he is locked out of his account for no reason, and it takes him over a week to get his access restored.
  3. AOL Hometown, a sort of neo-geocities, shuts down with very little notice:

    We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter.

    It’s an eviction; a mass eviction that happened under our noses and we let it happen.

Think, for a second, about what’s in your email archives: phone numbers and addresses of your friends, instructions for getting that tricky system at work to function correctly, love letters, pictures of your family vacation.

Sure there’s a lot of chaff mixed in, but some of this content is irreplaceable. Ever seen the love letters that your grandfather wrote your grandmother? Sure, we’re exchanging sappy poetry in a different medium now, but shouldn’t your grandkids have the same opportunity?

So stop trusting the cloud to keep this stuff safe for you. Set up Thunderbird to keep a local copy of your email. Use Google Docs Download or gdatacopier to keep copies of your online documents. Don’t ever delete local copies of those pictures after you upload them to Flickr. And for the love of pete, stop using services like Hotmail that give you no way to download your mail. Who’s mail is it, anyway?

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Update: Some more discussion over at Friend Feed

One Response to “Your life is in your data. Own it.”

  1. geo Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 9:58 pm

    Couldn’t agree more.
    I have always tried to keep copies of everything.

    furthermore if I am going to upload something I try to do it to a place where I will get a piece of the ad sales that sit beside my content or comments.

    http://www.vivzizi.com

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  • February 1, 2009 at 10:33 am Cameron Neylon
    Interesting that this meme seems to be doing the rounds now in lots of contexts. People seem to have more faith in their own hard drives (or institutional support) than I do I have to say.
  • February 1, 2009 at 10:40 am Neil Saunders
    I have mixed feelings, given recent events. I guess we should treat all (free) web services as "at your own risk" and implement our own backup where deemed necessary/desirable/possible.
  • February 1, 2009 at 12:50 pm Cameron Neylon
    I guess there are two issues here - if it is "on your own servers" (bearing in mind that means very different things to different people) it is relatively unlikely to be cut off without notice but I would rate the chances of catastrophic loss of data on both my own disks and (some) institutional ones as being higher than it would be on, for instance, things running on amazon servers
  • February 1, 2009 at 12:56 pm Neil Saunders
    It would depend to a degree on "whose servers?" You'd imagine Google/Amazon to be inherently more reliable than small startups. I guess Gears is a partial solution to cloud backup, in some cases, plus systems such as GMail/IMAP, but I like dekay's idea of a hybrid with local sync to the cloud app.
  • February 1, 2009 at 1:04 pm Lars Juhl Jensen
    I think a good solution would be open exchange formats. If you can easily transfer the data from one service to another, then it is also easy to maintain redundancy by having your data on multiple services. This would protect you against data loss in case one of them ceases to be.
  • February 1, 2009 at 1:09 pm Cameron Neylon
    It also ties into what I think institutional repositories should be doing - which is aggregating all this kind of material back and holding it independently. But data interchange formats are a key first step. You have to be able to choose to get it out and put it somewhere else (I'm sure we're all doing that with FF [cough...cough])
  • February 1, 2009 at 6:03 pm Chris Miller
    A few thoughts: 1) With big firms like google or amazon, I think it's less an issue of hard drives crashing, and more an issue of lock-in (and potential lock-out). 2) I'm looking forward to more services like birdfeeder (http://dsandler.org/wp/archives/2008/11/18/twitter-outage) that allow local control, but still sync to the cloud. (Not up yet, but looks promising)
  • February 1, 2009 at 6:33 pm Mr. Gunn
    Deepak is NOT going to like this. The issue about lock-in is relevant, though.

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