I was thinking about possibly switching to Gmail as it might be nice to have access to my complete e-mail from anywhere. I was therefore looking at how to possibly to migrate my existing Outlook e-mail to Gmail. Then I got to thinking – I probably would want to backup my Gmail down to my PC – in case anything happened. But then I use a backup service (Carbonite) to backup my computer to the cloud (Internet).
So I would be going from the cloud to my PC and then back to the cloud… Actually what this reveals is the tension we have to today with trusting “cloud” services – if I put my data – if I come to depend on internet services – it challenges my trust with who is providing it. What happens if they go down – if they are sold – if I have a dispute with them? Will I lose my data – my ability to do what I need to do?
So do you trust Google? Do you trust Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Craiglist? Do you have a backup plan?
Oh – that reminds me – I should backup the database for this wordpress installation as that’s my content now….
