
Why backing up your data is dead - iseff
http://www.iseff.com/2007/09/stop-backing-up.html
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revolvingcur
This seems a little misguided. Firstly, I don't intend to create most of my
important documents in a web application for a long time yet (read: 5-8 years
at least). It'll be awhile before there's a high-quality IDE/ _real_ Photoshop
alternative/video editor/etc. online, and who wants one anyway? The desktop
paradigm rules for its speed and better support for multitasking, so much so
that I believe it will never really go away.

Second, not everything is collaborative or needs to be shareable.

Third, you can be optimistic, but there's no denying that at today's transfers
rates, getting something into and out of the cloud is an arse of a lot slower
than pulling it off a HDD or even a LAN.

Everything we've done so far in the realm of online document creation will be
as a toy compared to what is to come. Starry-eyed optimism is great in some
settings, but calling for the death of backups is not the right way to build
momentum.

~~~
bilbo0s
Without a change in the law that allows them to do so, doctors and lawyers
will be creating and editing all of their important documents on private
machines and LANs for a good deal longer than 5-8 years.

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mechanical_fish
On the one hand, I don't agree with this article. But that's easy for _me_ to
say - I have backups, and I've worked hard to make them work properly. I don't
have to entrust all of my precious data to "the cloud" via my relatively slow
network connection.

On the other hand, this article is saying what I've said for years: web apps
are winning because most people have no idea how system administration works,
have no desire to learn, and would happily exchange money, privacy, and
freedom for a storage medium that doesn't die every two to five years, taking
all of their data with it.

For most of the computer users in the world, it's not so much a question of
whether backing up your data is "dead", but of whether it was ever alive in
the first place.

Last week an Apple Genius told me that my Macbook's hard drive had crashed. He
spoke in a sorrowful and apologetic tone, like a surgeon coming to tell me
that my mom had not survived her appendectomy. This surprised me for a second,
until I remembered that the typical customer regards the loss of a hard drive
as a terrible tragedy, rather than as an excuse to thoroughly test the
integrity of his multiply redundant SuperDuper backups.

(Incidentally: SuperDuper works great. And no, I do not own stock in the
SuperDuper guy's company. :)

------
bootload
_"... If all our documents are online ..."_

And if they are not?

I don't see all your documents online, nor do I see your important documents
(will, birth certificate, marriage certificate, shares, personal papers). This
type of app I'd rather have on my desktop.

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run4yourlives
It amazes me the level of trust the younger generation is willing to put in
faceless entities to secure their privacy.

Your tax return may not seem too important until somebody uses it to empty
your bank account.

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wmf
"Once we've killed backing up in favor for keeping our files in the cloud, the
next step will be keeping those files out of silos."

I'd prefer to do those in the reverse order.

