Double edged clouds
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.
This sort of thing is a problem I think about a lot lately.
Performance isn’t so much of a problem for me – the area I worry about is lock-in to the remote service.
For example, my email is currently self-hosted on a virtual linux system with clustered.net. One of the big reasons for doing this is that there’s essentially no lockin.
Linux is very well standardised, and I control the domains involved separately. It’s very easy to sync a backup of everything involved locally, and would be easy to move it all to another provider should I need to do so.
It’s tempting to move to “cloud” provider such as Google Mail.
On the upside, this gets me a user interface I like, and takes all the management out of my hands. Which is something I’ve mostly got under control, but I do find a hassle from time to time.
On the downside, I’m now locked into Google Mail. I’m told that backing up the mail content with IMAP works well, although I suspect it’s not going to retain all the labelling/contacts/filtering.
Plus, my data has probably now moved to the USA. And into a large company that has a reputation for locking people out of their accounts for “abuse” and being difficult to contact to resolve the issue.
It’s also likely to tempt me into the other google services such as Google Calendar, which are going to be even harder to move away from.
I’m still thinking about these issues, I’m not quite sure where I sit on the freedom/convenience balance.
Another related issue that I’ve gone on about in the past is long-term data access – I’m trying to avoid putting anything important in a format I don’t expect to have available well into the future.
Michael Stevens
November 30, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Lock-in issues apply whether you use software at home, in the office, or third party ‘cloud’ services. Everything I’m using I can get my info out of easily. If there are features that are unique to that service where that data would be lost on export I often don’t use those features.
I do use gmail, but I’m not a heavy label user. I use the service almost entirely via IMAP and the folder approach is enough for me. I know that I can drag my files and folders to any other email service at with a couple of clicks. I use my own domain name with Gmail (for one account, the other is vanilla gmail) so I can point that elsewhere to re-direct incoming email equally easily.
You may find this piece interesting about the relationship between IMAP folders and Gmail labels for folks that use both interfaces into Gmail:-
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77657
Ian Fogg
December 2, 2008 at 12:24 am
I too prefer the Evernote service — but I’ve had terrible experiences where I’ve used a sync service to store my stuff remotely, but when their service had a hiccup, my “good” folders were overwritten by the broken stuff from the cloud.
I do think we are in the early, early innings of services like Evernote. For example, Jeremiah Owyang recently suggested that all of the tinyurl links from his twitterstream be preserved for later access.
Brian Hayashi
December 2, 2008 at 12:35 am
Hi Brian – were those sync problems with Evernote or other services? I’ve had many nightmare sync problems over the years but Evernote so far has been good to me.
People always underestimate how hard sync is to do reliably.
Ian Fogg
December 2, 2008 at 1:00 am
Ian – The big difference I see with cloud services is that the risks from lock-in are worse.
For example, with a traditional offline software package, it may be difficult for me to migrate to an alternative, but there are fewer things that can cause me to need to.
With a “cloud” product there are risks like the company going bust, ceasing to offer that service, raising the price, altering the terms and conditions so your use is no longer acceptable, etc. All these can cause problems that wouldn’t occur with a desktop product.
Michael Stevens
December 2, 2008 at 8:08 am
Michael – Yes, I agree with you on cloud services and lock-in *if* the only store for digital content is in the cloud.
But if, the service has local sync as well as the web-based cloud app. *And* the locally synced stuff can be exported to other apps/services then I don’t see it’s a problem.
Worst case is that someone loses access to the cloud-specific features and is left with a local app and local data. ie no different to having opted for an offline app in the first place. Evernote illustrates this scenario pretty well.
Ian Fogg
December 3, 2008 at 12:05 am