Google's acquisition of FeedBurner earlier this week adds one more piece of my life to Google's servers. I currently keep personal data or rely on: FeedBurner, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, AdSense and Docs & Spreadsheets. I'm taking a lot of risk on by relying on Google for so much of my personal life. The same as if my hard drive were to crash, if Google were to go bye-bye some day, I'd be out of a lot of data.
Offline, I protect myself by backing up my data, storing data on multiple drives and storing data online. So why don't I afford myself the same protection online? The primary reason is that any way to backup my online data is cumbersome, and more importantly, not automatic. Another reason is that backup is only half of the equation; what about restore? There's no non-hacked-together way to restore data to most online services and so the ability to backup is pretty much pointless.
So where does this leave us? At the very least, should I be looking to spread my data across many companies? Does the increased survivability risk of an early-stage startup offset the diversifiable risk of keeping my data on one provider?
All this talk of Apollo, Silverlight, RIAs and the like makes us feel good about the future of web apps, but what about the boring stuff like backup and data portability? Open APIs are a step in the right direction, but most people don't want to have to deal with writing scripts and implementing their own backup system - they want it simple and seamless. Is there a solution in the works? What are you all doing to backup your online life (or are you not)?
Technorati Tags: Google, FeedBurner, Gmail, Google Reader, API, backup, personal data
Aaron Swartz points to Bandwagon, an OS X app that seamlessly backs up your iTunes library to a service built on top of Amazon S3. It'll be available on Feb 22, and bloggers can get a free account for posting about the service before it launches.
Technorati Tags: Bandwagon, iTunes, Apple, OS X, music, backup, Amazon, S3
Flickr is down. According to FlickrBlog:
We've had a temporary storage failure affecting a sizable chunk of old Flickr photos and are moving about 20 terabytes of photos across a few thousand miles (between two of our data centers) to ensure consistency and smoothness. ALL PHOTOS AND DATA ARE SAFE AND NOTHING HAS BEEN LOST.
Even though nothing was lost, this event does bring up a serious issue now that a lot of people are keeping the bulk of their lives online instead of on their local machines. Giving in to a false sense of security, I'd venture to say that a large majority of people are even more lax about a backup strategy than they were when most of their stuff was kept locally. The ease of starting up a website is a double-edged sword; it's a by-product of the fact that most websites are hosted on commodity hardware – largely the same stuff that sits on your desktop.
The only difference is that you aren't in control of the backup strategy. Flickr may have a great backup strategy or they may have gotten lucky. We don't know and we probably won't. But hopefully this little incident will push people to order DVDs of their Flickr photos or download their GMail to POP or even to create utilities that'll get your data back in your control.
Now that we're practically placing our lives in the hands of others, we just need to decide just how much actually trust that those hands won't drop us.
Technorati Tags: Flickr, Web 2.0, backup, data, information, storage, failure
