Alan Connor said at April 27th, 2008 at 12:01pm

More in this series of posts by Danny O’Brien, if you’ve not already seen.

Tim said at April 27th, 2008 at 12:20pm

That’s a great summary - I guess these processes do put reliance on Google/Yahoo/Amazon etc, but they’re still not single points of failure.

I’m intrigued by the Flickr backup, though - it sounds like you buy a ready-made DVD, rather than downloading/burning manually. Where does this come from??

James Cridland said at April 27th, 2008 at 12:48pm

Tim - I got mine from Englaze, though they’ve ceased that service I notice. http://www.flickr.com/do/more has a link to Qoop, which does a similar service (”from $9.99″).

Rob said at April 27th, 2008 at 2:01pm

Good call on the JungleDisk / Amazon S3 combo.
What do you use your Eee for? I looked at the specs, but it looks a bit lightweight for doing much at all with; would be interested to know how far you can push it.
(Also - you’ve an iffy link on the Jungle Disk price)

Jason Cartwright said at April 27th, 2008 at 2:06pm

Anywhere.fm has a good, free, flash frontend to store/play your music from S3. Admittedly you can’t get your music restored from them… so you’ll still need your backup I guess.

Barry Carlyon said at April 27th, 2008 at 6:21pm

Some interesting thoughts, I myself like the duplication of data, but I don’t use any services like S3, although I do have flickr and google accounts….

Welly said at April 27th, 2008 at 7:17pm

QOOP from Flickr is the one I use.

It took less than 2 weeks to get it from America to my door mat - and I could design the label from my PC!

Zarate said at April 28th, 2008 at 8:23am

I’m not that happy with the cloud : )

Although it’s crystal clear the advantages (and can only get better in years with better broadbands) i’d be really worried about confidentiality and where my docs and files are.

Google, Amazon, etc. can decide any time they want to modify their service or give up your privacy if the CIA or the FBI request it under whatever anti-terrorism law they fancy.

You might well argue that you don’t have anything to hide in your files, but that’s not the point. The more we give up the more difficult is going to be to recover it.

And keep in mind that your files are probably stores physically in another country, i’d like to know which law applies. UK? USA? EU?

maria said at April 28th, 2008 at 12:41pm

undoubtedly hosted applications are the way forward … however I do find I adopt my own guarantees by hosting my photograph albums free on eg social networking sites and whilst I use the google docs, I also frequently backup my important spreadsheets (eg one contains all my passwords and another all business/personal contact and banking details) by emailing them to my own yahoo account (and all my word docs & spreadsheets are all individually password protected)

steve martin said at April 29th, 2008 at 8:57pm

Thank you for sharing the Jungle disk recommendation James. I’m installed and backing up now. It should be finished by Friday! The costs are remarkable - in the family budget they’re well down in the noise.

It might be interesting to see how online storage changes attitudes to deletion. Until now, I’ve archived-off a DVD of possibly useful data every three months or so and been fairly selective in doing so. Now, whole directories are getting backed-up automatically, including the chaff.

Abi said at May 3rd, 2008 at 12:49am

It’s pretty cool that you have managed to live (almost) entirely on the cloud. My photos, videos and some of my docs are on the cloud but I still have some trouble using Google Docs (it’s not good enough yet especially with a lot of formatted text).

@Zarate, I am also increasingly concerned with privacy. I think the fact that government can look through my life without my permission is really scary. But I think there’s hope for a better president and Congress in 2008. Currently, I still keep my really confidential stuff on my local computer.

My little Asus Eee PC - blog - James Cridland said at May 3rd, 2008 at 10:37pm

[...] connected directly out, via wifi, to the internet), and partly it’s because I run my life in the cloud, with most of what I need either on a 4G USB stick that I carry around with me, or on my own Amazon [...]

Dan said at May 18th, 2008 at 10:04pm

My worry with “the cloud” is reliability and long-term access. Google just switched off Hello, for example, which was a family favourite. Now while it didn’t store data, it does demonstrate that you’re at the whim of a company.

I’m happier applying the “lots of copies keeps stuff safe” principle “locally” — by synchronizing between home computers and an external harddrive — and also “remotely”, to my sister’s computer (for in case of fire and theft). That solution also offers remote access (assuming one of the computers is online) but I’ve never needed that facility.