Cloudy with a chance of lost data

I guess I’m a member of the “old school” when it comes to storing personal data in “The Cloud.” This cloud thing has been around since the 1990’s first fostered by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. I scoffed at the idea then because I couldn’t imagine anyone storing personal information on some remote server in a cavernous warehouse in some god- knows-where location. What would happen if something went wrong with the server or the database program? What would happen if someone hacked into the server and stole the information? It was just too risky for me; not that I have anything that anyone would want to steal. To this day, I still can’t get my head wrapped around the notion of storing anything in the Cloud with the notable exception of my Yahoo! mail which I don’t have a choice. Why would I want to pay a monthly fee to store anything in the Cloud when you can buy a terabyte of storage for about $100. A TERABYTE! You could buy two and have one back up the other.

But it looks like using the Cloud for storing data is going to be the norm with the proliferation of new memory hogging applications designed for smartphones and netbooks whether I like it or not. The recent disaster with the Sidekick from T-Mobile seemed to vindicate my outmoded stance. Something happened to the server or the database software that was storing and managing information for about a million T-Mobile customers who pay a monthly fee for the service. The server either crashed or the database got corrupted or both and there was no backup. Those poor people lost everything, notes, pictures, e-mails, calendar info, contact lists, everything. Gone. Kaput. They were told it was unrecoverable. A few days later, thankfully, T-Mobile said “most” of the data was retrieved. But still. I would be hard pressed to trust the system again. You would expect the service provider to have redundancies in place to protect the data. I guess they didn’t.

As new mobile devices come to market that have much more capability and many more data intensive applications, the need for storage is only going to accelerate. While onboard storage is getting denser and cheaper, it will not keep pace with these memories hungry applications. There is even talk of having HD video recording and playback on these future devices. It’s inevitable that having a spot in the Cloud for the data you create will become a necessity. Let’s hope this incident with the Sidekick will spur the service providers on to develop systems that are failsafe.