if connected

The wobbly hard drive on my previous laptop forced me to think about where my digital stuff lives and how often it’s backed up. Much of my important, frequently changing documents no longer lives just on my hard drive and so back up isn’t necessary to ensure they survive a broken hard drive or a lost laptop. All of my recent emails — work (Exchange) and home (IMAP) — all of my contacts (Exchange), appointments (Exchange), notes (Evernote), todos (Evernote), and bookmarks (Foxmarks) sync with central “cloud” computers and are usable on multiple devices.

The cloud should make my stuff resilient to problems at my end. Instead the buck passes to others. I may still lose access to my data but it won’t be my fault. Essentially, I’m trading off one potential problem for new ones. Cloud services are a double edged sword.

Connectivity is the main weakness I worry about. The broadband connection between me and the service is a choke point that breaks everything if it fails, or if I’m in one of the many “out of coverage” situations (mobile “always on” Internet is a myth). Even on home broadband connections the upload speed makes sync to remote services slow which is why virtually all of the services I use sync small amounts of data. We need fibre broadband.

Sync is essential for mitigating some of the pain if remote services fail. Sync means I have a local copy of my stuff all of the time. Without it, if the third party has an outage then I lose everything. Bloglines and Friendfeed are some of the few remote services I use that are entirely web-based. I’d much prefer that they mimicked the Evernote approach. If they break, they break, and there’s nothing I can do.