This is a followup to my
recent column about Steve Wozniak’s warning on the perils of cloud computing, especially cloud storage. It might surprise many users to know there are firms that sell cloud storage and do not back it up. They rely on the disk RAID and some redundancy in the cloud to “protect” your data. If something happens to their datacenter, they could probably not recover your data.
Remember MailandNews.com? They did not have a viable business model. They also didn’t back up their servers. One day they had a big crash and relied on the RAID array to recover the data. It took two weeks and still not all of the data was recovered.
RAID is not a data backup technology.
What happens if your cloud storage firm goes out of business? Some companies will put your data on tapes and send them to you. Others will tell you to download it. If you’ve accumulated a lot of data, that could take some time, especially if everyone is downloading their data at the same time.
