I have to take some time out of talking about the usual stylish gadgets and accessories and talk something serious for a second. The hottest thing now is Cloud Computing and saving things “to the cloud”. Now I’m a fan of technology and all, but things like this make me nervous about the cloud. If some of you haven’t heard of a company called Xdrive, let me explain some.
Xdrive is a online storage company, that was offering users 5GB of free storage and charged a price for more. I remember Xdrive years ago and even used them for a little while, it was a great service before removable drives got so small that I could just carry one around without much trouble. I always thought about using them again, but just never got around to it. Now it seems that on January 12th, Xdrive will be closing it’s doors and all files on it’s system will be deleted then. My problem with this, is what if i spent time and resources investing in the heavy use of this company. I’m sure there are people who have, who now have to find another home for their data. My problem with “the cloud” is the infamous, what happens when the company running the cloud closes? How can one trust the cloud if you don’t know for sure if one day you will have to scrabble to find a new home.
That is my beef with Xdrive or any other online storage company, they can’t insure that they will never fold, go bankrupt, or otherwise shutdown. So how can we move forward with “the cloud”? How do we pick the right company who will be around for the long haul? Do we spread our data all over different sources in case one fails, if so should we pay many different companies for this.
What are your thoughts? do you trust “the cloud”?
