The relentless commercials for remote backup almost had me convinced to retire my arcane system of external usb drives and cases of DVDs on my bookshelf. Then a couple of weeks ago that little bit of doubt I was feeling became a reality for users of the T-Mobile Sidekick when a server failure at Microsoft’s Danger division left them holding a dataless hunk of plastic. Sidekicks rely on the servers at Danger to store things like contacts, photographs, notes, to-do-lists and other important user data. Sidekick users could do little but wait for Microsoft to restore the data. The interruption was so bad that T-Mobile temporarily stopped selling Sidekicks.
Periodic outages of cloud based services are to be expected but you would never guess that with the dependency that many of us have on them. Take Gmail for instance – when it goes down for even a minute people freak out. (Hopefully Twitter is available for you to see that link.) Now imagine if your Gmail account just goes poof one day. Unlikely, but many of us would be crushed because backing up Gmail is just not something people do and as a result, our only copy of some of our most important information is in the hands of Google. And that’s the real crux of the problem – the instant gratification of not having to worry about physical media backup is at odds with the long term realization that our important data is in the hands of others. Is the Sidekick issue a hint of what’s to come? Are we doomed to an event of large scale data loss?
We’ve been trained that backing up our data is our responsibility, and I may feel like I am doing the responsible thing by utilizing a remote backup service as a safety net in case of fire or theft, but it’s looking like I may have to start – you guessed it – backing up my online data to physical media in my home. Think of the absurdity of remotely backing up my data to Carbonite for example and re-backing that up to over a hundred DVDs. Anybody looking for a job as a professional backer-upper?
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