Your Data, Your Drive, Your Decisions
Staying grounded while everything is in the clouds
If the sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel, then the sky above the Internet is cloudy.
With all the talk of clouds, cloud services, cloud storage, cloud solutions, cloud servers, and so on; you’d almost forget that the term isn’t actually anything new. Those of us who are old enough, and geeky enough, to remember flowcharting can look back on our experience and remember that a cloud was often used to depict the Internet. The square icon would connect to a diamond icon which branched off to a cylindrical icon and a cloud icon. The cloud was the online world, where things could be stored and it didn’t matter how.
So referencing the Net as a cloud isn’t as new as some might think. That’s been around ever since people planned programmes with lines and pictures.
Today we’re encouraged, incentivized even, to store our data in the cloud. Our apps use the cloud, draw from the cloud, and push to the cloud. The first draft of this article? I wrote it on an iPad using the Google Docs app which saves the document, as I type it, to the cloud. Google’s cloud service drives much of my online life, actually. For better or worse, I’ve accepted Google as The Lord and Savior of my drafts, photos, social networking, news, email, and so much more. I use Google Drive on damn near everything from my desktop at work to my MacBook Air to my Galaxy Note 3. Google Now knows me better than I do myself.
But it doesn’t have everything, and it never will.
Cloud storage is incredibly cheap right now. I can get a full terabyte of storage on Google Drive for ten US dollars per month. Ten dollars a month for a terabtye? Sounds, great, right?
Or is it?
See, I have this philosophy that I will only give up control to so much data. My online life and my existence within the physical realm are closely intertwined. So when it comes to data and the hoarding thereof, I’ve found a far better pricing plan for storage. It’s a fantastic deal. I get one terabyte of storage: I can add more storage at any time for a nominal fee: I can store anything from music to movies, documents to eBooks; and I have access to it anytime I need it. The transfer rate is insanely fast. At the time I subscribed to it, there was an initial payment of $110, but prices have dropped since then. It’s even cheaper to get into the same plan at the same level of storage. Best of all, it’s all under my control with strict access to who can access it.
Oh and there’s no monthly fee and no transfer limit because what I “subscribed” to was a one terabyte, USB 3.0 external hard drive.
I want you to look at your digital life and ask yourself a very basic, but profound question. “Do I really need to put all of this stuff online?” Where do you access your data, and I mean the data you really want? Your digital movies, books, music, photos and so on? Do you think it’s a good idea to put a ripped DVD on Google Drive or Dropbox? Of course not, even if it’s pulled from your media you know that putting ripped (or pirated) stuff on a cloud drive is probably not the smartest move. You’re going to keep that on a hard drive, or a USB stick, or something that’s off line.
So if you’re going to do that for some data, why not most of it?
My cloud drives are conduits. They act as transfer mechanisms for moving data from one system to another. While I do keep keep a very small amount of data on Google Drive, it’s stuff I’m going to blog about very soon. In other words, all of it is going to end up on the front page of a website sooner or later. It’s not like it’s super-private. The primary reason my Google Drive exists is because I use a MacBook to do my job. That may sound weird, but when you realize that I’m using a Mac in a library where everything runs on Windows, it makes more sense. I can create a graphic in Pixelmator (my image editor of choice) and then pick up the JPG on the web server running Windows Server and IIS. Right tool, right job.
The drive goes into my bag when I’m done and that bag is always with me when I’m using my computer. If you have your data readily accessible, when you want it, as you want it… then there’s little difference between a cloud drive and a hard drive. It all comes down to monthly payment plans, of which the hard drive hasn’t any.
As the corporations get bigger, their control grows. There’s no good reason to give them everything and, when you get down to it, there’s no good reason to give them anything. It’s always up to you.
