Cry 'Woof'
It’s summer time, and I’m busy with family things. Thomas Aquinas will return in a week or two.
We hear a lot about the “Cloud” these days, and I suspect many readers have only a cloudy idea of what the Cloud is.
What the Cloud is, is computer hardware that you don’t own that you access over the ‘net to do things and store your stuff.
The Cloud is incredibly useful; it’s a treat to be able to move from my computer to my phone to a friend’s computer, and still access my stuff. But there are some caveats:
- If you lose your network connection, you might not be able to access your stuff.
- Your stuff is on a hard disk owned by someone else. How far do you trust them?
- Lots of cloud services are free for casual use. If the provider goes away suddenly, you might lose your stuff permanently.
Convenience comes with a price, and consequently I follow a couple of rules.
If it’s private, I don’t put it in the Cloud. My financial data, for example, stays local. I back it up (I’d hate to lose it), but I don’t know whether I can trust these guys or not. My bank has a “secure” website, but I don’t use it—presumably I can trust my bank to be good bankers, but I can’t trust the folks in-between. Call me a Luddite.
If I’ll lose access to my stuff when the service goes away, I only put ephemeral stuff there. The primary example of this, ironically, is Evernote. Evernote is very useful to me; it’s my writing and notes platform of choice. Many of my blog posts begin as short comments in an Evernote notebook. But unless you pay them some money, Evernote is really an on-line service, even if you install the Evernote application. If it were to go away, I might or might not be able to access my notes. So while I’m happy to leave stuff on Evernote long-term, I don’t treat it as archival. Anything I’d really hate to lose goes somewhere else, and preferably on a disk I own. (I might be being too harsh, here, but better safe than sorry.)
If it’s creative work, I make sure I have a local copy. Two services that are really good for this purpose are DropBox and GitHub. When you install DropBox, it creates a “DropBox” folder on your local computer; and then it synchronizes the contents of that folder across all machines logged into your DropBox account. I can work on something on my iPad and save it to DropBox, and then find it on my desktop computer when I get home. DropBox keeps history; if I overwrite something accidentally, I can go to the DropBox website, and find it. But the main thing is, the DropBox folder is just a folder on my disk. If DropBox goes away, I’ve got all of my stuff on my local disk; and if I back up my local disk (and you do, don’t you?) then it gets backed up along with everything else.
GitHub is similar, though primarily for textual material like software source code. (I’ve written about GitHub here). It uses the Git source code management system, which is a system for managing and retaining successive versions of source code files; and the neat thing about Git is that when you clone a Git repository from GitHub to your local disk, you get the whole thing: not only the current version of your files, but the entire history. In short, if I’ve got all of my GitHub repositories cloned to my local disk, then I’ve got everything, all my creative work, right there on my disk. And as with DropBox files, it all gets backed up locally. (There are some things on GitHub that don’t get cloned by default: issues in the issue tracker, wiki pages, and such like. But the core thing, which is your source code, the thing you went to GitHub to manage in the first place, that’s copied locally in all its glory.)
In short, go ahead and embrace the Cloud; it’s useful. But at the same time, be careful. The Cloud is fickle, and might drop you like a hot rock at any moment.
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