This reminds me of that debate between 'hackers' and 'crackers'. The semantics have since become irrelevant.

Personally it makes no difference to me whether you call it cloud storage or data centers. As far as users are concerned, cloud storage is storage not on their physical machines/phones.

Whether the service is availed for end users or for developers is neither here nor there. The end result is the same. All these people you pay to provide backups are not immune to forces of nature or forces of incompetence. As for definitioons I think you're splitting hairs here. Suppose Microsoft backed up that data to S3 or Azure. Would we still be having this argument? And what if the gmail interface application went offline (as it did some weeks back). For that period I was unable to access my email. And in fact I remember vividly because I had some invoices in my mail that I needed to action. (Mercifully i downloaded copies). For those hours there wasn't any difference between application failure and storage failure -- at the end of the day you could not get your mail/

I personally believe it is your responsibility to back up your data. Phone book addresses, contacts, etc. Your bank analogy is not correct because the banking systems are not mine to backup. I do however have access to my phone contacts, emails, mp3s, ebooks, files etc and therefore I should take precautions. Having a copy online as the ONLY backup is not good enough. See the link I sent about an online backup company losing 7.500 customer's data.

You might not like what i said about backups but that is the reality of the matter. Sh!t happens, if you excuse the French.


On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 6:40 PM, saidimu apale <saidimu@gmail.com> wrote:
Rad, quick question: do you back up *all* your bank statements and transactions? Your bank's servers could go belly-up any moment. Assuming you do it diligently, should this be expected of users? In your words, why should users care? They're paying you to make sure Murphy is outwitted.

With Microsoft/Sidekick users, there was no facility to backup their data to their phones, unless they had the technical knowhow to hook it up to their laptops and hope they could retrieve the data from non-supported software. Again, in your words, why should users care?

It is not an issue of semantics. Amazon AWS is *not* an application, it is a service on which developers build applications that end users interact with. The Microsoft/Sidekick model is *not* a service for developers, it is an application for end users. The expectations of data backup and data loss are completely different! In one case, AWS and the like, you are interacting with developers and it reasonable to expect/demand independent backup, in another (Microsoft/Sidekick) you are dealing with end-users and it is irresponsible to expect independent, un-supported data backups.

Back to bank statements: it is reasonable to expect banks to independently backup their data from their storage providers, it is completely unreasonable to expect end-users of the banks to do the same.

Complexity should always be shifted from the end-users to the developers. We're paid to (essentially) manage risk for the user, not worsen the situation.

saidi