To me, cloud-based storage is a convenience that should never be completely relied on or trusted to reliably store or give access to anything.
This is true, but unfortunately it is also true of a hard drive sitting in your home attached to your computer. Hard drives break; computers can go crazy and corrupt your hard drives; hard drives burn in fires and get zapped by electrical surges and become soaked in floods. Moreover, the slow upload bandwidth from your home severely restricts your access to the data stored there when you're on the road, even if you're a master of SSH tunneling and the power doesn't glitch.
The big thing that convinced me to embrace online backup is the burglary scenario. If a burglar enters your home, it doesn't matter how many copies of your data you have on local hard drives, or whether or not those hard drives are kept connected and running. The burglar is liable to take everything.
You can make offsite backups on physical hard drives that you physically move from place to place. I'm too cheap to pay S3 to store my ripped CDs and recorded TV shows, so that's what I do for such things. But it's a lot of work, and I'm always behind.
As for the encryption issue: Is all the data in your home encrypted? The odds of one of my local hard drives being stolen are probably larger than the odds of my encrypted data on S3 being cracked. Yet I don't encrypt my home drives (except for tiny bits of data like my stored passwords) because I fear that the odds of my misrecording the key, or of something getting corrupted, are in turn far larger than the odds of me really caring when a thief makes off with the top-secret MP3 files of my niece singing Happy Birthday.
I should have clarified: I think online backups are a great idea (provided they're encrypted archives). The author of the article says, quote, I don’t want to mess around with personal storage. Personal storage on-device is like buying your own power station for your house. Anyone who carries round their data WITH them is living in the wrong century.
This is a different thing entirely. He's basically saying that personal hard drives are obsolete as a storage medium, which I find incredibly preposterous. The "century" doesn't matter; the Internet is nowhere near ubiquitous around the globe, and I imagine it never truly will be. Of course there are other concerns: bandwidth, security, fly-by-night companies, etc.
I'll be the first to admit that if you burnt down my apartment right now, the only stuff that would be saved is code for projects I'm currently tracking. I do hourly backups, but they're all done to a local drive. Everyone, including me, should have off-site backups if they have important information on their computer hard drives. That's something I think everyone could agree on.
He's basically saying that personal hard drives are obsolete as a storage medium...
I don't think that argument is preposterous at all. I'm halfway there, already, even with my anemic cable internet connection. It just requires a shift in thinking. You may look at my setup and say "you're storing data in a personal hard drive and backing it up online over a fairly slow internet connection". But someone else could look at the very same setup and say "you're storing your data online, but because your data connection is kind of slow, you're keeping a big local cache in a personal hard drive."
It's not as if the distinction between storage and backup and cache is necessarily cut and dried. They're amorphous and fluid categories. If called upon to distinguish between them, I'd probably claim that "primary storage" is a label for "whichever medium is most durable" -- in which case it's not at all clear that the cloud isn't more "primary" than my hard drive. There are risks and downsides to storing cloud data (bandwidth, security, fly-by-night companies), but there are also risks to storing local data (crashes, security, fly-by-night system administration :), and it's unclear which is better. The best thing is to diversify and keep copies in several places.
I would never refer to my iPhone as "storage": I conceptualize it as a cache, a subset of my data that I carry around with me only because the network is slow, not ubiquitous, and not always trustworthy. I now treat my laptop the same way. If I weren't too cheap to buy a whole terabyte of S3 storage, I might well come to think of all my local machines as nothing but local caches of my S3 data, as well as local backups in case S3 gets taken over by Skynet or IP lawyers or some other threat to humanity.
This is true, but unfortunately it is also true of a hard drive sitting in your home attached to your computer. Hard drives break; computers can go crazy and corrupt your hard drives; hard drives burn in fires and get zapped by electrical surges and become soaked in floods. Moreover, the slow upload bandwidth from your home severely restricts your access to the data stored there when you're on the road, even if you're a master of SSH tunneling and the power doesn't glitch.
The big thing that convinced me to embrace online backup is the burglary scenario. If a burglar enters your home, it doesn't matter how many copies of your data you have on local hard drives, or whether or not those hard drives are kept connected and running. The burglar is liable to take everything.
You can make offsite backups on physical hard drives that you physically move from place to place. I'm too cheap to pay S3 to store my ripped CDs and recorded TV shows, so that's what I do for such things. But it's a lot of work, and I'm always behind.
As for the encryption issue: Is all the data in your home encrypted? The odds of one of my local hard drives being stolen are probably larger than the odds of my encrypted data on S3 being cracked. Yet I don't encrypt my home drives (except for tiny bits of data like my stored passwords) because I fear that the odds of my misrecording the key, or of something getting corrupted, are in turn far larger than the odds of me really caring when a thief makes off with the top-secret MP3 files of my niece singing Happy Birthday.