It’s an evolution. Think about your money – can you put your hands on it? When it’s all automatic and reliable, you won’t be thinking about where your data is. Although I think I’ve got some floppy disk backups somewhere in one of my closets…
Early
Is it a good idea to turn over something as important as your music data to complete strangers; who can go out of business and take your data with them? Using the “cloud” as an additional back-up probably makes sense.
I will never give up control of my drives (or similar device(s) in my possession and under my control) in favor of the cloud. No way, no how.
+1
Advertisers make “the cloud” sound like some sort of utopian place… it is nowhere near as secure as physical backups on your own locked premises nor can it ever be. You are at the mercy of some other person’s human error or malice. And to think some people trust their financial applications there, its just crazy to me.
Don’t clouds usually bring bad weather? 
Me too 
Hopefully not this Victoria Day weekend !
Man, the mosquitoes are out in force here already.
Province wide fire ban here so that will curtail a lot of party-goers I would hope.
Have a great weekend Robin.
Every silver lining has a cloud…
From a little band I recorded some years ago.
It can’t make external hard drives obsolete when “the cloud” is just an external hard drive racked in a data center that you access over a network cable.
It has uses as an off site back up, or for mobile or third party file access…but it’s only 1 of 3 copies of your data that you should be maintaining to be truly backed up.
QuBe.
I couldn’t fully trust the cloud with my data. Not for a long while yet at least. (I try and never rule anything completely out). I would rather be in control of my own data, rather than risk a hack or failure where that data may be lost / compromised permanently.
I agree there’s something not quite right about sending all your work to some remote server, but on the plus side the data is constantly being error checked and backed up. That’s why I store my important backups in more than one place but I’ve still been down to the last copy on occasions due to various problems
Definitely not interested in that idea, I’ll look after my own stuff. These companies can go out of business quickly, can get hacked even quicker, hardware failures, software failures, the list is endless. Back up your own stuff to an external drive, CD, DVD, pen drive, whatever. Though, admittedly, a cloud is somewhere else to backup…
I wouldn’t worry about it.
My job is to sell software to big companies that manage stuff like the cloud (but other things too).
I wouldn’t use it for primary storage, but as a backup to your local drives? Yes. In fact, I’m sure a few of you have signed up for remote backup solutions already as a tertiary backup to your DVD backup strategy. Where does that go: to the cloud of course.
Data loss due to storage failure is something I’m not concerned about. During my IT days I was in application development. One of my jobs was at Cheyenne Software, noted for their emphasis in backup solutions. I know how thorough the software and processes (more importantly) were back in 1995. It can only be better now.
Data loss through security leakage, however, is another story. Ironically, Cheyenne was bought in 1997 by my current employer (CA Technologies, though I had left for Wall St. by that time), who sells a strong security portfolio. It is noted that, no matter how good the technology, if someone really wants to leak your information they’re going to do it. (“But we can minimize that risk with CA solutions!” Heh)
Humorous story meant to illustrate that the technology is only as good as the processes established to use it:
After leaving Cheyenne, I got a phone call from my former manager 6 months later asking if I had taken the source code for my projects with me and “it’s okay if you did.” Of course I told them no (because I didn’t), and later found out from him that my old computer’s hard drive had failed.
They didn’t make a backup of it. I couldn’t stop laughing at the irony, especially since we didn’t separate on good terms.
I can almost guarantee you that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. have well established processes to deal with backups including full redundancy. The liability exposure is too great for them to do otherwise.
That makes sense to me but I would have thought one significant and obvious disadvantage compared to a local USB drive would be speed? I know my broadband upload speed here would pretty much render it useless as far as backing up a typical Cubase project goes. Fine for Office docs, pics etc but gigabytes worth of Cubase files? - I don’t think so!
[quote=“]foolomon”]
After leaving Cheyenne, I got a phone call from my former manager 6 months later asking if I had taken the source code for my projects with me and “it’s okay if you did.” Of course I told them no (because I didn’t), and later found out from him that my old computer’s hard drive had failed.
They didn’t make a backup of it. I couldn’t stop laughing at the irony, especially since we didn’t separate on good terms.
[/quote]
There is sometimes justice in this world… 
I thought about these online backup drives but I worried about putting my business records, accounting files and other important stuff somewhere where I was not in total control of. And there is the speed issue. I now use a second internal drive, plus a network drive. I backup all my music projects and documents to both plus my documents folder is also replicated on my laptop.
The only advantage I see is having a remote backup if I was to loose all my computers through theft or fire. Loosing all that information would cause me severe problems. Are these online drives more or less secure than paying for private web space?
Aloha guys,
I had a ‘back-up maniac’ buddy back in Toronto who kept lots
of back-up copies on many different medium but all in one place.
The place burned down.
Since then I make regular back-ups and store/exchange them with a buddy who
keeps his back-ups with me.
In the cloud or out of the cloud, always keep additional back-up copies in
completely different locations.
That being said, I find that the free service ‘Dropbox’ can be really useful.
{‘-’}
Well the old-school backup strategies involved grandfather → father → child schemes with duplicate backups: one on premise in a fire-proof safe and another off-site. The fire-proof safe, however, wouldn’t completely protect you since if the fire was hot enough the backup medium would melt due to the ambient temperature inside the safe from the conductive transfer of energy from the outside where the fire was to the interior of the safe.
With the cloud, this is a non-issue especially if your vendor has a SAS70 certified data center. That plus (in the U.S.) regulatory compliance requirements (for PII, PHI, etc.) means that your data is not only recoverable but also secure.
Finally, to the point that Cubase projects are huge bear in mind that cloud-based backup solutions use a concept similar to the Window’s BITS program. BITS, an acronym for Background Intelligent Transfer Service, waits for idle time to actually download Windows updates. Do you get the data in as fast a time as possible? No. But the impact on your system’s performance is negligible since it’s only using leftover capacity (CPU and network bandwidth).
We store multiple off site backups, along with the safe.