[ProgSoc] Data Persistence in the cloud

Daniel Bryan danbryan at gmail.com
Tue Jan 18 15:36:38 EST 2011


On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 11:44 AM, James Ducker <jducker at progsoc.org> wrote:

> I thought I'd solicit some opinions from fellow Computing Enthusiasts,
>
> I have ~60GB of digital photos, stretching back about 10 years. For most of
> that time they have existed on a single HDD (!!!), and for the past 2 years
> they've been on a RAID5 volume, which has been great, as initially I had the
> dreaded Seagate 7200.11 series disks, which failed all the bloody time.
>
> Anyway, following the logic that disk redundancy won't do you much good if
> your computer dies in a fire, or is stolen, or kicked slightly too hard, or
> submerged in water, I've started dumping them to Amazon S3. TO DATE, this
> has been awesome, and incredibly cheap compared to my two alternatives: buy
> my own rack and put it in a data centre, or rent a VPS, both of which are
> really overkill for what is a private, access-once-in-a-blue-moon file
> server.
>
> Has anyone else tried this? If so, any lessons worth sharing?
>
> - James
>
> --
> *James Ducker*
> Pretty Cool Guy(TM)
>
>
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True to style, I didn't reply to all initially.

I think a lot of people, myself included, have started to question the
assumption that we're moving smoothly towards a future in the cloud. The
events around WikiLeaks last year really emphasise how tenuous our grip is
on many services we rely on and how easily we can be cut off. Services and
companies that are emblematic of what we think is the age of free
information and digital liberty have been shown to be really quite
compromised and subject to the whim of various powerful interests.

Not everyone is a fugitive anarchist bent on applying information theory as
a tool of poetic terrorism, of course, but there's plenty that can go wrong
with the cloud, not least the possibility of services being terminated
and/or providers going out of business. Maybe these risks are less than the
material danger to backup mediums you have direct physical access to, but
they're still real. Broadly (but less fanatically) I agree with Stallman[1]
that cloud computing is a step backwards in many ways, at least in its
current guise.

The convenience and advantages of cloud computing can't be denied, but
personally I'm waiting for the development of more open alternatives -
probably several years away - before I'll really jump on board. I think
cloud solutions sit on a spectrum between convenience/economics and
freedom/self-determination, and existing services are often skewed too
strongly in favour of the latter.

As you say, a VPS or a dedicated server may be overkill, but as a computing
enthusiast I think it's an easily justifiable investment, and if you have
that remote infrastructure directly under your control all sorts of uses for
it spring up.

It's really difficult regardless, though, because even our best storage
technologies have pathetically short lifespans. I prefer to not think about
it, hope I don't lose everything and have science-fiction fantasies about
some kind of global, redundant, distributed, P2P backup tech.

Daniel

[1]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman
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