Is the cloud a safe place for your data?

In recent events, T-Mobile lost personal data of thousands of subscribers who own a Sidekick device. This is obviously unacceptable but it’s the reality we live in. Big corporations lose clients data every day, not all of them intentionally and not all of them are victims of hackers, they’re just victims of technology. Checkout the announcement displayed on the T-Mobile web site on October 12, 2009.

This is scary and shows us that we’re ultimately responsible for the safe keeping of our data even when it’s stored in the cloud and we’re paying customers of large corporations. I’m a regular listener of several Podcasts, not only photography Podcasts but technology as well. A couple of months ago I listened to a photography podcast where someone was having an argument over not uploading all of our photography onto the cloud. There was also a counter argument defending the fact that we should trust the cloud because the technology is mature enough and that it’s the way technology is going.

As many of you, I do have lots of pictures and most of these images are stored on the cloud but I also have several backup USB hard drives in my office. I know that many of you are using Drobos but my current budget does not allows me for such luxury, so in addition to my USB drives I also have a backup subscription with Mozy and I also use Dropbox and Live Mesh to store some of my work on the cloud.

You can say that my files are backup 4 times and I can recover from several levels of computer disaster combining all of these backup components.

Here’s my usual workflow: I download my CF cards directly onto my laptop’s hard drive and depending on the type of pictures (client, personal, etc) I create a folder either in the Dropbox tree or the Mesh tree. In either case they are picked up by the daily SuperDuper backup job and the Mozy backup job as well. My files are now safe – Phew!

The other portion of the workflow is to make the pictures available to my clients. So the unprocessed photos remain on the compact flash cards until I finish editing the copies on my computer and upload the final versions onto Pictage for customer viewing and/or to my web site. Once the pictures have been uploaded my Lightroom library is then moved onto a DVD and stored for “final” archival.

If one of the USB drives in my office fails, all what I need to do is get a new USB drive and start the download process of downloading the missing images from the cloud onto the new USB drive or just get the appropriate DVD’s and copy the contents back. This ensures my images are still in at least 4 places and if the cloud storage providers go out of business or something dramatic happens to them I will still have all my images.

Cloud storage is great and I encourage you to use it with caution and make sure you have alternative ways to restore your valuable data from disaster.

T-Mobile us not the only example of data loss, there are several companies that faced this problem before. A couple of weeks when Google email was out for 100 minutes, it was a disaster for thousands of users. What was Google’s response? They basically said that they don’t care and if the users (you) don’t like the quality of service, you can go elsewhere for “better” service. (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team interviewed by Leo Laporte in This week in Google 6:All your Os are belong to us)

Cloud storage technology is maturing every day and I’m sure that one day it will become the only storage we ever need. Laptops will have no permanent storage devices and all of our data will live in an organic network dispersed across the world. But today I will keep using my local storage “Just in case”.

Tags: cloud storage, dropbox, gmail, google, live mesh, microsoft, mozy, photos, safety, sidekick, t-mobile, usb