Cloud Storage for the Consumers

Much of yesterday was used up trying to look for a set of files, due to a recent hard drive malfunction I no longer know what I have and what has been lost.

After searching through my stack of hard drives  low and behold the files were located in the second last hard drive  That was lucky because the last hard drive was a IDE harddrive, and I don't think I have a suitable enclosure for it. 

But, this event got me thinking about the types of medium that is suitable for storage. One of the consequences of going digital is that we will be more prone to loosing information if it is stored incorrectly. Take for example, prior to digital cameras most people had their photos developed in a studio and they had a hard copy of the picture. These formats generally degraded over time, however, the benefit was that some of the information would still be legible - in the case of a picture you may still be able to make out what is being represented in the picture. 

Now, with the digital age and with digitising everything - some of the key benefits of course are that you have less clutter, and the quality wouldn't be expected to degrade over time. However, the key aspect is really time. 

Over time, with technology, everything tends to become outdated. I remember having tape drives holding vast amounts of information. For the general consumers were CDs, and then DVDs, then blue ray disks. The life expectancy of a DVD or CD's are 30 years, and Blueray discs are expected to be much greater of up to 150 years. Both of these haven't been tested in the wild yet to confirm whether or not this is the case. However, if you take blueRays as an exmaple - if you have stored media on a blueray disc there is no guarantee that in another 150 years you will have anything that will be capable of reading the media. In a consumers' sense, they wont have these types of machines available as they keep upgrading their technology. 

Now, in my case, I was thinking that I need a mechanism to :

1. store my information safely for a long time (maybe not for 150 years) but long enough based on the information
2. Be able to search for the information easily and efficiently
3. Be able to be accessed anywhere and any time 

After considering these as my requirements, physical media wouldn't be capable of meeting requirements 2 and 3. So the only item that I can think of that can meet these requirements was going to be personal cloud storage. 

There are so many companies offering free and paid services, they normally provide some sort of web interface to manage your files, or even multiple applications for your devices. In my case, they tend to meet each of the requirements very well. 

A couple of considerations to make when you pick a cloud storage provider : 

1. Check out how long they have been around - assess the risk of them shutting up shop and taking all the information with them. 
2. Check out whether they will breaking any laws - there were many people who used MegaUpload as  method of cloud storage. However, MegaUpload and MegaVideo were also participating in infringements which at the end brought down the company. All the users to date haven't been able to obtain their files. 
3. Consider using multiple hosts - have one as your backup to minimise the risk of #1 and #2. 
4. Make sure you understand the companies interest in providing you with free storage - Remember nothing is free in life. 

So right now, I'm using both drive.google.com and also UbuntuOne. I'll do a review on these soon, however, for the mean time I hope this has helped with your storage needs.