Quote:
Originally Posted by Trollheart
Yeah it's externals for me too. ... Sure, but I find cloud storage useless for larger files like videos and some music, as it takes forever to get it uploaded and then of course you have to stay with that provider or you lose all your data (cough) Livedrive (cough) I just keep buying external drives, some of which are just hooked up to put the data on, then removed and stored, never used unless needed. Let me tell ya man, the days of storing on DVDs are over!  |
To respond to Trollheart - the usefulness of cloud storage is the data redundancy (mirrored across multiple hard disks across multiple servers located in several different countries), the 99.99% recovery rate, versioning, and live accessibility from any web-enabled device.
As for it "taking forever," yes - the initial 2.2TB transferred at a steady 44GB/day for a total of 52 days. But in the end, my data is safe, encrypted using 128-bit Blowfish encryption both up and down, and the company is quite stable (for now.)
Of course, things can change, and for that very reason I maintain an additional locally-stored external mirror as a safeguard. And you're spot-on about never using it for access, just for archiving and the occasional restore.
The total expense is just over $100 a year for truly unlimited storage (I've read the fine print) which is a small price to pay to have instant access to every piece of your data - large or small - from any device.
So don't write off cloud storage as "useless." It has its place.
And to return to the thread topic (remember the thread topic?) it is unbelievable how far we've come from punchcards to monochrome CRTs to the present. For the monthly price of fiber optic, I operate a media server with more content than I could ever consume, and with an unlimited data plan, I'm free to stream endless DVD quality video and lossless audio from my server anywhere with 4G LTE or wifi.
My first computer had an 80MB hard drive and 640k of RAM. Tomorrow, I'm buying a jetpack.
