This resonates well: I just finished a first proto install of a local personal cloud with a Raspberry and a USB drive. I've always been reluctant to putting my files in a 3rd party cloud except for backup. I have pics of my kid and feel I have the duty to ensure these will still exist in 30 years, and in 30 years most likely none of Amazon or Apple or Google or Dropbox services will be the same as they are now, if they are not simply discontinued.
I live and work in China, and often advoces the same lines to my colleagues, most of whom are trusting Apple with all their files. They don't see the danger, but even if you leave politics aside, moral values and taboos change much faster than we think. For instance, the "loli" thing in China is not taken as seriously (litote) as it is in the West, and many pics/drawings that would send you to jail in US are deemed most innocent here. But in 20 years it can be different.
The electronical devices I buy are my property, I have root access. I can change the software running them.
My files belong to me and no-one else. I am responsible of them, if some are lost it is my fault.
Yes, it was some kind of ironical use. But in fact the remote storage and services we call "cloud" is not more revolutionary than the same thing done locally.
With all those new tablets we move around in our houses and outside[1] we certainly need a central repository of things like our music and pictures, and Google and Amazon et al. know it well enough[2], but I do not agree to trust them with my important stuff, and some recent bad experiences show that data sent to the "cloud" is not your anymore, except if you run this "cloud" on your server.
Well, if you get three-five small machines, put CouchBase on them, and maybe even install the CBFS (couchbase filesystem) project, do you not have a private cloud? Replication, failover, etc.
You certainly have a private cluster.
While "cloud" is associated with living in some datacenter somewhere, it is not a precise technical term, and there's a lot of marketing towards businesses to "build an enterprise cloud" (where it's a private cluster in a datacenter or building owned by the business.)
You seem to imply that there's a minimum latency between your personal machine and the "cloud" machines for the cloud term to apply. Or just that the servers have to be owned by someone else?
I think the real meaning (or intended) for "cloud" is a cluster, or set of services that are designed to run on clusters....a collection of machines that provide services, as opposed to the specific meaning of "cluster" which is a set of machines providing a specific service.
>You seem to imply that there's a minimum latency between your personal machine and the "cloud" machines for the cloud term to apply.
not latency, abstraction. If i'm building a server out of parts and wiring it up in my closet, that's a server. If somebody else wires up a server in their closet and rents it out to me, that's a cloud. The cloud means not having to think about things like hard drives failing, and keeping hot spares of servers. So yes, that often means failover clusters but the real point of cloud is that it doesn't matter whether it's a cluster or not - the physical architecture is somebody else's problem.
> If somebody else wires up a server in their closet and rents it out to me, that's a cloud. The cloud means not having to think about things like hard drives failing, and keeping hot spares of servers.
I'd say a VPS could nominally be called part of a cloud, but most serious deployments, pre-cloud, were some sort of colo arrangement where if a hardware part died you had to either drive up to the DC and go swap out for a new one, or else call up the DC staff and ask them nicely to fix it for you. Your hosting wasn't a black box.
I'm confused (and perhaps younger than you). It went like this: servers under desk -> colo -> vps/cloud/everything as a service? There wasn't a huge dedicated hosting market between colo and cloud?
> I have pics of my kid and feel I have the duty to ensure these will still exist in 30 years, and in 30 years most likely none of Amazon or Apple or Google or Dropbox services will be the same as they are now, if they are not simply discontinued.
I never got why people mistrusting the cloud implied the cloud should not be used. Surely a local server AND a cloud server would be the best solution? It's been drilled into my head that everything will fail eventually, so you should base your technology across many different services that are unlikely to fail simultaneously.
I think that misses the point, people with perfectly legal uses for mega upload services had their data hosed when mega uploads was shut down. How is Dropbox immune to this (it may be that it is, I have no idea). If someone else stores all your data, you are entirely in their hands.
The main difference between Dropbox and any "web only" hosting solution is that Dropbox replicates the file on all your machines that are sync'd with Dropbox. So the file is both in your hands and replicated in the 'cloud'.
So unless the government pulls their server just as you upload your encrypted file, and somehow your HDD simultaneously fail immediately after upload, Dropbox does not have the same vulnerability as Mega/Rapid/etc-Uploader if you're uploading encrypted files.
There is a caveat though, you are not just uploading, but syncing your local file as well. The governement having your Dropbox file deleted will delete your local file on sync, and you'll be SOL if you didn't keep other backups.
No, if the government pulls the Dropbox servers (my original stated scenario), your client will not be able to communicate with Dropbox servers, ergo your files will stay intact.
If you mean to say that the government will maliciously delete all files WHILE keeping Dropbox servers online. that is a possible scenario, but extremely unlikely as to not even be worth pondering (i.e. there is no benefit to the government to do that).
Though I must also add: Dropbox is a synchronization service, not a backup service. And even if Dropbox was a backup service, you should have multiple redundant copies of critical files. Don't put all your eggs in one basket and all that.
Ahh, good point, exactly (and wow and having no hint of sarcasm as that is blindingly obvious now). Dropbox has this behaviour by default, yes. MacBook Air owners with piddling hard discs (me) may use it as a cloud only store by messing around in prefs, and then forget that it ever worked any other way. I know this misses the main attraction of Dropbox, but one day Ill have a decent disc and will restore it to its former glory.
I live and work in China, and often advoces the same lines to my colleagues, most of whom are trusting Apple with all their files. They don't see the danger, but even if you leave politics aside, moral values and taboos change much faster than we think. For instance, the "loli" thing in China is not taken as seriously (litote) as it is in the West, and many pics/drawings that would send you to jail in US are deemed most innocent here. But in 20 years it can be different.
The electronical devices I buy are my property, I have root access. I can change the software running them.
My files belong to me and no-one else. I am responsible of them, if some are lost it is my fault.
Etc.