Why you don’t want to depend on the cloud

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http://consumerist.com/2013/03/25/microsoft-outlook-locks-you-out-of-your-digital-life-wont-explain-why/

Jerry

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Sorry, Jerry, have to disagree, that has nothing to do with the cloud. Not that I agree with Microsoft’s behavior (quite the contrary), but people should be aware of the service agreement of services they sign up for, to avoid this kind of problem. On the other hand, someone must have the possibility of overruling this behavior from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Apple (as they are the ones who can cause this type of trouble on any of their users).

This is quite easy to avoid, anyway. My Microsoft account is based on an email account that’s not hosted by Microsoft. No one can close it, but me.

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This is quite easy to avoid, anyway. My Microsoft account is based on an email account that’s not hosted by Microsoft. No one can close it, but me.

I’m feeling a bit dense tonight, but I find this hard to follow. How do you accomplish it, and why can’t Microsoft cut you off?

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I’m feeling a bit dense tonight, but I find this hard to follow. How do you accomplish it, and why can’t Microsoft cut you off?

My Microsoft account is based on email address which is not hosted by Microsoft. This means that while they can lock me out of Skydrive, they can’t lock me out of my email, so the consequences of a scenario such as described in the article would be mitigated.

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Rui, I respect your opiniions. However I would venture the vast majority of Windows 8 Microsoft accounts use a account controlled by Microsoft and linked to a Microsoft Email address. They also link skydrive cloud services. My point is that you are at the mercy of a cloud vendor’s policies (not just Microsoft) and you could lose access to your data. Its easy to say “people should be aware of the service agreement of services they sign up for” but very few people actually read these let alone understand them. We may have to agree to disagree here.

Jerry

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Why you don’t want to depend on the cloud

Because:
What then do I do on a Sunny day?

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A while back I reported in this forum that I too had been locked out, although I didn’t experience anywhere near the frustration of this user. I was able to get an answer relatively quick from MSFT as to the reason, simply by following the procedures laid out in the e-mail.
As to the reason, it was a photo that I had on SkyDrive, that they (who ever the H they are) found offensive. I have since then been very careful, but I have seen photos on other SkyDrive accounts that were a lot more offensive than the one that I had on there.
I also read the TOS, at that time and it does clearly state that they can terminate your account for certain things.

Good Luck to that guy.

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This proves without doubt that all our personal data and images are routinely scanned assessed as “appropriate” by someone or something. It seems this used to be reserved for countries like China yet in now seems that the USA has become a dangerously powerful and over-bearing State when Big Brother is watching you and where any variations to the norm are spotted as “outliers” and dealt with. My suggestion would be to ditch the cloud despite it’s great convenience, even with nothing to hide the thought of someone trawling through my files make my stomach churn.

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Encryption. At the very least 7zip with encrypted file names and a password to the archive. If your cloud provider doesn’t allow encrypted files, find one that does. they’re out there, good ones with years of history of relability.

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Boy! Another HOT topic!

What really is a ‘cloud’? Where is the ‘cloud’ and who maintains it?
Too many questions and far too few answers.

There can be no argument….once you send your critical data off premises, to a place you’ve never seen and under the care of people you don’t know (some might even be convicted felons) you’re at their mercy. I’m reminded of the employees of AOL, who were selling clients info to ….(well, who knows). They were finally busted, but only after thousands of peoples personal info was stolen and sold.

If you really want to protect your data files, then don’t give them to strangers. Eh?
I don’t understand why some folks have such a hard time wrapping their minds around that rather simple concept.
Remember your Mother’s admonition….”don’t talk to strangers”.

I’ve been setting up backup schemes and data security programs for persons, banks and corporations for over 30 years.
When I first started, we were still using 5.25″ floppy disks. Thank Goodness we’ve come a long ways since then with data storage.

I do have a lot of data, going back years, that I really don’t want to loose, but if I did, my world would not come to an end.
Having said that, I do weekly backups of my entire C drive to external media. Daily, I do data backups to two, USB 3, drives.
One is a 32 gig USB3 flash drive and two is a 1TB USB3 2.5″ hard drive.
A simple batch file, using XCOPY, does the backup for me, in just a few seconds. It’s an incremental backup, so only new files or files that have been updated are copied.

Clouds can ruin a picnic, I certainly won’t let one ruin my data.

Y’all have a great day now, Y’hear?
The Doctor 😎

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Its not just MS, but all of the cloud service vendors, including Amazon AWS. If you “depend” on the cloud you’re going get burned.

The facts don’t lie, the “Cloud” is still a work in progress, too many frequent service outages, which are sometimes hours or days long, sometime horribly slow data speeds and access at their end, surprise/gotcha true cost, etc.

The cloud may be good enough for family photos and some backup jobs, but I sure would not trust it for realtime corporate data needs, not even close.

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A simple batch file, using XCOPY, does the backup for me, in just a few seconds. It’s an incremental backup, so only new files or files that have been updated are copied.

You mean XCOPY /M /S, don’t you? 😮

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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A FWIW experience. Years ago, AOL had a cloud called “My Space”. They closed it down overnight ! No notice, no nothing. Talk about screaming users. I read about a lady whose husband was an X-15 test pilot and all her photos were gonzoed. No recourse at all. All that I had on it was a copy ( copy ! ) of my family genealogy, no loss. Keep this in mind when using any cloud. JP.

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A FWIW experience. Years ago, AOL had a cloud called “My Space”. They closed it down overnight ! No notice, no nothing. Talk about screaming users. I read about a lady whose husband was an X-15 test pilot and all her photos were gonzoed. No recourse at all. All that I had on it was a copy ( copy ! ) of my family genealogy, no loss. Keep this in mind when using any cloud. JP.

Well put!

That has been my point, exactly, since day one, when the word “Cloud” first raised its ugly head.

The user, who uploads his/her files to a “Cloud” (by any name) is actually giving their most valuable data to “Strangers”.
Can you say “Stranger Danger” ???

It’s not really a ‘Cloud’,,, it’s a Server someplace with hard drives very similar to what we use on our own PC’s.
They can CRASH or be Zapped by lightning, just like our home computers. The company that manages them can go out of business and just pull the plug, like AOL did with “My Space”.
If a ‘Cloud’ is there today, there is absolutely NO guarantee that it will still be there tomorrow, or next week, etc.

Thank you, I will keep my own data close to me on reliable backup media.

Y’all have a nice day now, Y’hear?
The Doctor 😎

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Quote Originally Posted by handcuff36 View Post
A FWIW experience. Years ago, AOL had a cloud called “My Space”. They closed it down overnight ! No notice, no nothing. Talk about screaming users. I read about a lady whose husband was an X-15 test pilot and all her photos were gonzoed. No recourse at all. All that I had on it was a copy ( copy ! ) of my family genealogy, no loss. Keep this in mind when using any cloud. JP.

Well put!
It’s not really a ‘Cloud’,,, it’s a Server someplace with hard drives very similar to what we use on our own PC’s.
They can CRASH or be Zapped by lightning, just like our home computers. The company that manages them can go out of business and just pull the plug, like AOL did with “My Space”.
If a ‘Cloud’ is there today, there is absolutely NO guarantee that it will still be there tomorrow, or next week, etc.

Much like using a layered defense against viruses/malware, the cloud can be a redundant backup. I would encrypt any data sent to a someone else’s server, I would not send them my mission critical/sensitive data. On and off site storage on DVD/USB is one layer I employ. The same for HD images. If you think you can have too many sources of backup or too many copies, ask yourself: What is my data worth to me? The answer to that question will guide your hand…

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Like DrWho, I do NOT trust the “Cloud” with my personal data, except with some pictures that I readily share. I do NOT put any financial data up “there”, wherever “there” is.

The one place where Skydrive is helpful to me is in sharing pictures with those you wish to see them. For me it’s much easier uploading pictures to Skydrive than to email them to all I wish to see them.

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Sharing either pictures or data files has been around for YEARS! Nothing new!

For as long as it’s been available I’ve been using Photobucket for sharing photos and Box.net for sharing programs and other data files. I can also upload all that stuff to my own web server, for quick and easy download.

But…..I have all that stuff archived on my own computer and on my backup drives.
It’s all OFF Premises, only for sharing convenience, not for archiving.
My archives are all right here, safe and sound under my own control.

Cheers Mates!

The Doctor 😎

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Without cloud based services (not just storage), many internet based systems would grind to a halt. Many websites and databases exist on shared virtual servers and these are part of “the cloud”. Commercial grade cloud services cost money, but with that cost comes Service Level Agreements and accountability.

Big players in the market make profits through economy of scale: investing in huge infrastructure so they can offer online services cheaper than it would cost to deploy similar services locally. Take the virtual server example above. I recently calculated that my user’s email database could be transferred to an online hosted Exchange service for approximately 1/3rd the cost of a new physical Exchange server.

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Well NO, not exactly.

I was speaking only of the DOS command that I use, not the specifics of exactly how I use it. OK?
(different people may want to use it differently)

/M /S actually won’t do it. Using the /M switch kills your ability to copy to more than one backup media, which I do.

Here is the entire command line for backing up “MY Documents” and all its sub folders, as many times as you want to as many locations as you want.
I actually use two batch files, one to backup to my 1TB external HD. That’s drive M.
I also back up to a 32 gig Flash Drive and that’s drive L.

xcopy “C:Documents and SettingsAlexiMy Documents*.*” “M:My Documents” /S /Y /H /R /D

This works and has been working on my PC for several years.

😎

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… Using the /M switch kills your ability to copy to more than one backup media, which I do.

A genuine observation for those who may be wondering:

The /M switch doesn’t explicitly kill the ability to copy to more than one backup media – but it does make mistakes in multiple backups much more likely without additional coding.

The use of the /M switch copies files which have the archive bit set – and then (crucially) unsets it on the source file.

From this we can see that sequential lines of xcopy using the /M switch will cause a script to fail to identify the same source files using the -a bit set as the identifier in a second or subsequent pass.

i.e.

xcopy c:temp*.* /S /M H:backup1
xcopy c:temp*.* /S /M K:backup2

will not guarantee to have the same data in the backup1 and backup2 folders because the -a attribute will have been unset by the first xcopy command and any files that previously had the -a attribute set will be skipped in the second line.

DrWho’s solution appears more robust.

Presumably the key element is the /D switch which copies files with a “changed date” prior to the date specified (or prior to today if no date is given). I think that’s pretty much the same as looking for the the -a attribute using the /M switch, but doesn’t unset the -a attribute. On the otherhand there is a risk that dates can get fouled up across more than one target. For example, does the target file inherit the source file modified date and what happens when you have to recover a file – will the recovered file pick up the original date or the changed date, or today’s date.

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Of course, you could always make the first backup using XCOPY /M /S, and then make full copies of the first backup. In this way, you could easily make all the copies you want by using the /M switch for the first copy only, because subsequent copies wouldn’t depend on the archive bit being used as a marker.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Well NO, not exactly.

I was speaking only of the DOS command that I use, not the specifics of exactly how I use it. OK?
(different people may want to use it differently)

/M /S actually won’t do it. Using the /M switch kills your ability to copy to more than one backup media, which I do.

Here is the entire command line for backing up “MY Documents” and all its sub folders, as many times as you want to as many locations as you want.
I actually use two batch files, one to backup to my 1TB external HD. That’s drive M.
I also back up to a 32 gig Flash Drive and that’s drive L.

xcopy “C:Documents and SettingsAlexiMy Documents*.*” “M:My Documents” /S /Y /H /R /D

This works and has been working on my PC for several years.

😎

I stand corrected.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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To be fair, most reputable cloud vendors have much more substantial back up strategies than users. The cloud has its place as a secondary backup destination and for collaboration and multi device syncing as users like RUI employ. Using a cloud as the only source of your data is the only thing that is dangerous.

Jerry

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I just came across this balancing article that was fed from a LinkedIn mailshot.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, the cloud is not just about photo storage for your Great Aunty Mable. The cloud is big business and has been for many years. If you access online banking, buy or sell via online auction sites, use webmail based services, plus many other mundane things, you are already immersed in the cloud.

I would expect most if not all visitors here use cloud services even if they do not know it.

The point about backups however is quite valid and, no matter you store your data, you should have more than one copy of it held at different places.

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To be fair, most reputable cloud vendors have much more substantial back up strategies than users. The cloud has its place as a secondary backup destination and for collaboration and multi device syncing as users like RUI employ. Using a cloud as the only source of your data is the only thing that is dangerous.

Jerry

They do, indeed, Jerry. The cloud makes all sense as another layer, backup wise. A big part of computing will move there too. The big players are leading that move, so most users will have some contact with the cloud, even if they don’t realize it, as Tinto correctly stated.

The idea of a lone server somewhere, well, sorry to say it, is totally outdated. Cloud computing means massive data centers, often with geo redundancy for user data. Not only there are backups, but they can be and often are, geo redundant. The idea that lightning can take something like that apart, just like a desktop in an ordinary house, that’s just SO dated. Even at home, a decent UPS can take care of that, let alone in modern data centers.

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