Entelligence: Cloud's illusions I recall
By Michael Gartenberg 
posted Oct 15th 2009 5:15PM
posted Oct 15th 2009 5:15PM
Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he'll explore where our industry is and where it's going -- on both micro and macro levels -- with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.
The Sidekick story is complicated, and there's much rumor and speculation as to what went wrong and how. To be clear, Sidekick is a T-Mobile branded-and-sold device and service, but the Sidekick technology comes from Danger, a former startup now owned by Microsoft, which T-Mobile pays to keep Sidekick going. Trust me, there's going to be lots of finger pointing and perhaps a few class-action lawsuits before this all comes to an end. While finger pointing is fun, it's not the issue. (And, as grandpa used to say, when you point your finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you.) Some argued with me last night that cloud computing is perfectly safe, it's the company deploying that you need to look to. OK. I accept that. Only thing is that Danger's been doing this pretty well since 2002 and at no point did I ever see a single warning from anyone that dealing with T-Mobile, Danger or Microsoft might be a bad idea when it comes to personal data solely living in the cloud.
My real question is how much is your data worth? Not the cost of the data streams you pay each month, but how much value does your data have to you personally? Recently, when I visited a client, I was asked to check my laptop at the door and I was asked how much my computer was worth. The guard was somewhat surprised at my stated value of my system. "Is this computer really worth a two million dollars?" he asked. "No," I replied. However, the information on it is worth that and perhaps more to me. Could you re-create every document or email you've ever written? Re-acquire every song in your collection or re-take every photograph in your catalog. Perhaps you could, but even if so, at what cost and what effort?
The problem is that cloud computing hype and the idea of storing everything in the cloud has gained such buzz that it's reached down to the consumer level. Sure, there are companies who can deliver great cloud services -- and until last week we might have counted Microsoft and T-Mobile among them -- but the real issue is that businesses have professionals to deal with these issues. They're called IT folk and they make a lot of money keeping things running. What's happening now is the
It's a world where the head of house is CIO, the spouse runs the help desk and the kids do tech support. |
Consumers need to understand that prevention hurts less than cure. Forget things like anti-virus software as the sole means of preventive measures -- it's time for consumers to learn to focus on data backups, especially for content that doesn't live locally. (I'd actually argue that much anti-virus software is a waste of time and the fact that their vendors depend on new viruses for their livelihood is disturbing -- some vendors even pay "bounties" to the first users who "discover" new viruses or strains.). Instead of hassling users who need to sit through boot and virus scans, vendors should work with them to help implement cohesive data backups, like a master file for PC users or DVDs for laptops. That way, if disaster strikes and the cloud vanishes in a puff of vapor, users can be back up and running quickly. You can't argue with the savings in time and money.
Most readers here know this but it's worth repeating because knowledge doesn't replace action. It's important to know your risks, wherever your data lives. As Joni Mitchell sang. "It's cloud's illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds at all" And perhaps neither do we -- at least not as well as we think.
Michael Gartenberg is vice president of strategy and analysis at Interpret, LLC. His weblog can be found at gartenblog.net, and he can be emailed at gartenberg AT gmail DOT com. Views expressed here are his own.
After reading alot about this issue, one thing has stayed in the back of my mind. "How do i get a hold of a 'server-grade' HDD so that i can back up my stuff?
Really, how do i go about backing up my data so that im not moving it from one time-bomb to another?
Halp...?
As the old saying goes : "Buyer, beware."
You could always use a RAID setup on a home server. That way, even if one of the harddrives fail, you still have all the data on the rest of them. You can even get one of those hot swapping racks that will indicate when a harddrive has gone bad, so you can freely replace any that break and you never lose any data(barring some kind of massive freak disaster). It's not inexpensive and it takes a bit of work, but it's doable.
tape backup?
how about SSD? i think SSDs are much reliable than normal Harddrives. i may be wrong
Microsoft buys a company and ruins it right away....
You can get an Apple Time Capsule and pull the HDD from that, Apple says they are "server grade" at http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/specs.html
(scarcasm)
Buy two external hard drives, with at least the capacity of the drive(s) in the computer you wish to backup. Connect one of them, and use a backup application (Windows Backup or Apple's Time Machine are included with two popular OSes) to make a backup of your computer. Take that drive offsite, e.g. I keep a backup of my home computer in my desk drawer at work).
Make another backup to the second external hard drive, and keep that near your computer. Make regular backups, and occasionally swap the drives' locations.
Try not to have the computer and both backup drives in the same place ant any one time. You're covered against theft (from one location), drive failure, fire, accidental file deletion. Sometimes (rarely) you can suffer a failure of the drive you're trying to backup, while you're actually trying to make a backup. With two rotating drives, you always have one intact backup, i.e. you're never half-way through overwriting you're only backup.
Something to remember with backups: they're only useful if you can restore from them, so occasionally, you should check you're able to restore your data ok.
If you're paranoid about having multiple copies of your data, you should consider encrypting your backup drive and the drive in your computer.
My thoughts on backups to the cloud: Don't rely on them. Maybe have one copy of data in a cloud backup, but don't let that be your only copy. The company who stores your data could go out of business, and in the event of a catastrophic failure requiring a large restore of your data, it takes aaaages to copy all your data from the cloud back to your computer.
I invite your thoughts on any of this?
On the same note, I would caution against using a single "server grade" harddrive to back up. It doesn't matter how "server grade" a drive it, it's got a flimsy magnetic disk spinning at 7200RPM with read/write heads right up next to it(which will destroy the whole thing if they so much as touch the disk). You're better off going with multiple non-"server grade" disks in a RAID than a single high quality one.
@xtole
Actually, NohOne was making (somewhat) relevant comment. As the OP, i will allow this. :P
I guess the point is that MS and Apple are both now with their own Data Backup products issues. Which goes to my original point, where does the commoner, like me, go to ensure their data?
Is it time to print all my pictures?!
Oh no! I was called a "fucker", I am not sure if I can stand being called such names, I think I am going to go running to mommy and have her tell your mommy to leave me alone.
I was joking, adding in a little sarcasm as he wanted a "server-grade" HDD when Apple proudly announces they have "server-grade" HDDs in their products. I could have, I didn't, but I could have brought up the failing Time Capsules, the lost data simply for logging into a computer (oh, but it really isn't lost, it is still there you just need to be a UNIX genius to figure out how to get it back - something that my parents couldn't do, something I probably couldn't do), I could have brought up the hit piece with a bunch of BS claims posted over at Apple Insider about danger, I could have said something about the the BS claims that Apple is better (such as that article from the Apple Shill [pun intended]) when they have a week of absolute failures, and on, and on, and on.
Instead I make a little joke, and you have a fit. Well, now we know what kind of person you are for running around calling people "fuckers." Now crawl back into your little hole.
Also: I like how I suddenly went from neutral for about 10 straight minutes down to lowest ranked in the span of about 10 seconds, all for a perfectly well reasoned and helpful comment, answering a question the original commenter was asking. Perfectly proves my hypothesis that I have a bit of a stalker following me around on here.
I am suprise as well, Mark....
Seems someone is gaining from the comment system.
Just don't let a company called "Danger" manage your data
Seriously?
Burn to optical disks or copy to hard drives and separate hard drives / optical disks by hundreds of miles. Or pay IBM and similar service companies to store data on separate cloud servers - how some companies survived the 9/11 destruction of the twin towers.
Or just be lazy and copy the most important stuff that cannot be reproduced, onto either a thumb drive or an external HD.
You can't. Life's like that.
There are a few ways to backup your data. You can buy a two bay external harddrive with RAID support so everything is saved on it twice with no effort. This is great if you have a laptop. Or you can do as mentioned and invest in a good pack of DVDs or even blu-ray and store everything that way. Just stay away from Memorex.
What I do.... I have a desktop computer with 4 harddrive bays. The main drive is a 1TB Samsung F1 server grade HD (also has a 7yr warranty) and picked up for under $100 when I found it on sale. I believe it is getting discontinued for a faster model so finding them cheap should be possible. It's one of the fastest out anyways so it doesn't matter to me. I have a 750GB drive as backup for my movies and a 500GB drive installed as well to backup music and everything else. Sounds a bit over the top. I am one of the lucky few. I have never had a hard drive go bad but I never keep a hard drive much longer them a year anyways because I always need more room.
Depending on your setup and needs, you could get by with a 50 disc cake of DVDs or spend $300 on a RAID external with 1TB- 1.5TB of storage.
Hope this helps more then the whining about ranking.
@mr mario
I use an online storage service, i have two 320gb SSDs at home, and a raid configuration setup at work. that's the best way to do it my friend.
maybe this was done on purpose by microsoft to do away with cloud computing before it catches on.....
Microsoft is the the future of cloud computing, I don't see a motive in there anywhere.
I guess you dont know about Live Mesh
Microsoft is all about the cloud.
Azure services too, that's actually pretty much the .Net version of EC2
Ever heard of "three screens and a cloud"?
Good read! I don't believe much in cloud computing, and have a backup of all my data on 2 different external hard drives.
Do you store at least one of the drives off-site? If not, what happens when your house gets robbed, or catches fire?
I may be paranoid, but I keep several backup versions on a NAS (Raid), and have a copy in my safe deposit box. Hard drives are cheap these days, so there's no reason not to have a few backups.
Cloud networks are still the best solution for future devices. It does not make sense to store the same data on thousands of separate hard drives in the future. By using a centralizing mass storage (with redundancies), they should of been able to prevent things like this from happening. Hopefully this is the event that wakes other companies eyes and really invest and rethink their systems.
i had no idea that's how sidekicks stored data. never owned one... but thanks for solidifying that fact for the rest of my life.
y is the owners own personal information stored somewhere other than the device? isn't this how celebrities information got stolen from their devices? its stoopid
T-Mobile and Danger/Microsoft would do to skip the blaming each other/lackeys and get down to an extremely grovely and expensive apology.
This really must have taken some epic incompetence to let something this catastrophic happen. I would be tempted to never trust them again.
Or, maybe MS secretly hate "the cloud" because it will eventually destroy their software business and think this might kill it at birth /wildconspiracy
Dude. Data backups are nice and all, and they will help you immensely in any type of computer disaster, but how exactly does backing up your data prevent hackers and viruses from getting at your stuff? I now have 2 copies of all my data...and a hacker in Slohackistan has the 3rd copy. I'm STILL screwed!
my sidekick contacts were my rolodex. not only did i have names and numbers, i had things like birthdays, childrens names, and other info which too most may not mean a thing.
to a salesman they are the difference between closing and not closing.
maybe it could be considered my fault for thinking they would back up my information but since it is what the company led me too believe, which is noted in my t-mobile account, i think i stand a pretty good chance in court.
Sorry, but i wouldn't take any business-person with a Sidekick seriously.
Just my opinion.
I agree with mario. If a sales person pulled out a sidekick on me while trying to close I'd take him a bit less seriously. What are you, 14?
thanks for your opinion. and i mean that in the most sarcastic way possible.
i was applying value to my data. do you have a counterpoint or just flapping gums?
aside from aesthetics and some aspects of the OS, i don't see what's wrong with using a sidekick. it's way better than using something like a razr.
It's simple.it's called iTunes sync. I have 4 iPhones pay $160 total.
For some reason or another in last 2.5 years fir some tchnical reason or reboot or trying to sync music from diff Pc . Or simple sim card dislodge I've lost all my info on all 4 iPhones.
Lost text contacts music movies apps games safari favorites emails etc. N with one simple resync to iTunes . Poom. Jobs gas saved the day again n again. iPhone 3g )49.
You trust iTunes with your data?
What if your phone takes a swim and dies and so you decide to switch phone brands because you wanted something more waterproof. How do you restore your contacts on a non-Apple phone? Can you even access your sync info (contacts, calendar, etc) without the phone? There needs to be a universal, non-brand specific solution.
After reading this I figured I would comment. I am an animator working on a short film, I have spent 3 years animating it with at least 6 freelancers. The current size of the unrendered source files is over 30 GB for 5:30 of animation. If I loose this thing I basically loose 3 years of my freetime late nights and effort. So they whole $2 million dollar thing is spot on. This film, my client work, pics, music, videos, tv shows eat about another 1.5 TB.
For backups I have a incremental backup setup every hour (I am on a mac… get over it… and use Time Machine). I don't trust that, so I also dump about 10 GB of the most important files to my me.com account. After that I also have a 500GB drive at work where I backup my files every month or so by dragging this old hard drive home, then lugging it back to work. I also keep a 250GB portable drive on me at all times, On it I have about 80 GB of the most important stuff and anything I want to work on. I use a cron synch application to keep this drive, my main work drive and my laptop all in synch.
If this isn't enough I got Mozy and have been backing up my main content for about 2 months now (it takes that long). Once thats done I will continue to do all the other backups.
It comes down to the fact that I have lost numerous internal drives and external drives over the years, not to corruption but to drive failure. I like knowing that I have everything and when something does fail, I don't freak out.
Im abnormal, I have no idea how other people get along trusting computers that fail and services that can equally fail, ignorance is bliss?
It's good to notice that while the "two million dollar laptop" story is always amusing, it's not very original. The author probably read it, like me, on the book Digital Life, by Nicholas Negroponte (back from when his was still heading the Media Lab on MIT, much before the OLPC project). It would be nice for the author to point that out instead of claiming the tale as his own.
Interesting, makes me wonder how much we all rely on gmail and the like....
Over the last 25 years I've used multiple floppy disks, tape drives, ZIP drives, CDs, DVDs, and now external hard drives for backup. At some point, unfortunately, all have had failures, it's the nature of the beast.
I don't consider something effectively "backed up" until it exists in at least 3 places. My phone and PDA (2 separate devices) data is backed up to my PC, which is in turn backed up to a USB hard drive and a small NAS unit. I use the NAS unit to sychronize my desktop, laptop and netbook, so technically I have important data in at least 5 locations.
Yea, I hate to lose data.
Yea, but your drives are still under one roof.
My friend's house was recently robbed. They took everything that wasn't nailed down, including all his computer equipment. With it went a lifetime of digital photos.
I suggest storing a copy off-site.
Call me crazy but could we have cloud computing and back up data on our own phones as well. That should be a default.
hmmm....been using multiple clouds for years. I have my contacts on Yahoo, Google, AT&T, and the Exchange server at work. Hell I even make regular backups of my Blackberry to my laptop. Seems kinda daft to only have your info located in one place in this day and age. The bitch is keeping as few duplicates as possible.
It isn't TRULY backed up until you have a hardcopy in fireproof storage!
Life is fragile. Relax and move on.
Looks like I am joining you, Mark.
Indeed. What's even more interesting is that about 10 minutes after whoever it is accomplishes their task, my comments float back up to neutral.
Whenever I decide to use a cloud service, I ask the following questions before I begin:
1) Can I access the data offline
2) Can I archive that online data so it can be used if the could goes poof
3) Can that data archive be used by another piece of software not made by the cloud service in question.
If I don't get all yeses, I don't use that service for anything I would be upset about losing.
TMobile may not be directly at fault, but when they outsource this type of service to another provider, TMobile needs to make sure that the provider has measures in place to prevent this type of problem. And for that, they're liable to the customer who pays them and not Danger/Microsoft.
I think we could use a refresher. "Cloud" = machines or networks you can't physically configure yourself, but whose resources you get to use. "Backup" = a stored version of something. "Redundancy" = storing more than one copy of something.
In computing you can mix and match levels of execution on each of these three to have a secure experience. The question comes down to how much you trust someone else to keep the official version of the data (i.e. your bank -- how often do you have your own back up copy of that data for instance?) Or how much you trust someone else to keep a backup of your own data (Carbonite for instance). If you don't trust anyone like a lot of the posters, then yeah - you are "IT-ized". Hope you can do it better than the tech companies.
What we really need is a "guarantee" of data security by the cloud providers (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, carriers, et al). Say you "accidentally" delete all of your contacts. Then you'd have a way of undoing that. The synch scenario with its nightmare cases of connectivity and currency problems can result in times when things get deleted "on purpose".
Given that all the world's digital data is maintained on spinning hunks of plastic and metal, you can bet parts of your data go poof often. So yeah, lets version our data, obviously. (Since some of us are only zygotes this Sidekick thing is our first lesson.) Sounds like the cloud we techies want lets us have our own copy of the data. The only other option is full trust of the providers. I'd get that gurantee though if you go netbook-only.
Through all my 28 years of playing with computers, I've only experienced 2 bad failures (1 infection and 1 corrupt drive)...three if you include a motherboard's leaking capacitors.
So, am I lucky, or is this more or less what most people experience?
Seems to me that maintenance is far more critical if you don't want to go through the steps of recovering your hard drives, data and computer set up.
Screenshot is wrong- the song is by Judy Collins, not Joni Mitchell.
Stop using cloud as a cool word for every app that interact with a server... This isn't cloud computing at all... It would have been related to "the cloud" if it would have been running on Azure or EC2 or app engine etc. BUT THIS ISN'T CLOUD COMPUTING...
"They're called IT folk and they make a lot of money keeping things running."
We don't get paid that much, that's why f-ups like the sidekick issue happen. Alot of companies don't pay their IT departments enough to care about equipment. Only the threat of needing to find a new job in the current climate keeps people on their toes. If another company is hiring your data is at risk of negligence.
Wow, it is really bad that those servers crashed. fortunatly, i had backed up all of my sidekick data on my computer, so i was fine. It would have been the worst thing in the world to have lost all of my sidekick data. I have people numbers that have moved away, and it would be impossible to rebuild my contact book. I know from experience that my computer is definatly worth two or three million dollars. Thats why i spent the extra 500 dollars and got a western digital nas running in raid 1 so that i don't have to deal with any of these cloud storage problems. Although, i do think that cloud storage is a great idea. Think about the amount of people that use gmail. What would those people do without gmail. Are they afraid that googles servers are going to crash and that they are going to loose all of their stuff, no, but are they cautious, yes. You don't have to be afraid that your stuff in the cloud is going to dissapear, but you should definatly make local backups on a nas or dvd to prevent anything bad from happening to your stuff. I don't know what would happen if i lost my gmail inbox, i would probably die. 8-). btw, how come all of the comments are about which hdd to get?
RIght on!
The old ways are always the best with more lee-way and TRICKS to get in and around.
The Keeping Up With The Jones's , future-ist "You Have To Do It This Way or Else" CRAP, will only limit you to what the manufactures want you to believe about security and New "HOW TO" Back ups.
Do you honestly believe the 4G revolution is NEW? "N" Dual core, Dual Band , etc?
Hell No, the government had this Tech Last Year!!!! Everything the General Public Gets Is Not New Tech!!! It's a Year Old compared to when it was released! You all are chasing your tail!
OK - the point is think Simple, think Back to the basics: Rolodex - DOS - Tape/HD Back Ups - Cassette and Vinyl Records. Pen and Damn Paper! Print out what you NEED, Not What You Want! Plenty of services for that -AFFORDABLE too. Don't Ink Jet them!
The odds are 1 in a million something will go wrong with the Old School Way. But those are better odds than buying a trouble free US Car? - Isn't?
Wake up - Stick to the basics! Enough with the Complaining!
Quite a few people posting here need to realize that fault tolerance is not in any way a backup.
Having two (or more) drives mirrored (or striped with parity) protects you from one (or more) drive dying. This is fault tolerance. However, it does absolutely nothing to prevent data corruption or destruction through ignorance, mistake, or malicious intent.
If you absolutely can't afford to lose the data, you need a true backup: an archival point in time snapshot of the files, stored in a separate location from the main copies. That way, if something goes wrong with a file and you don't realize it until much later, you can still revert to old copies.
You should have both. But if you can't, pick the archival backup. Fault tolerance is nice, but a system can be rebuilt if the archival backups are there. You can't restore old data from a fault tolerant system. That data is just gone.
VSS can give you some of this archival functionality on a single drive system, but if the whole filesystem goes, or VSS doesn't for some reason or another do its job properly, then you are in trouble.
Why is nobody posting that Microsoft has recovered the data?
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/oct09/10-15sidekick.mspx
Shhhh. No sizzle there man.
Awesome title.
We really don't know clouds...at all. :)
"My real question is how much is your data worth?"
So, can it be worth a lot? Yes. for the average sidekick owner, no offense, was it?
The only sidekick owners who should be part of any law suits, which, lets face it, hardly deserve to be heard, should be the 4 random ones who used the exchange support. THAT'S valuable information.
Why is there a Motorola logo on a Sidekick???
I have started doing my list of ongoing jobs on Google spreadsheets a while ago. Whilst trying to install a gadget to display a part of it in IGon my homepage, I managed to wipe the entire spreadsheet! In a brief second I realised that it the information in a cloud is not being backed up as part of my regular computer backups!
I was fortunate enough to be able to undo the changes, and a copy-paste into excel resolved the issue, but it is now one additional step when I want to back up everything!
I trust the cloud, maybe more than I should, because when you are working with these large companies like Microsoft and Google they have the money to go in and recreate data on lost drives. They can spend more than I make in a year many times over recovering data. So why not entrust them with it. Anything really important I also have stored on a RAID 5 array, but I would sooner expect that to fail than my cloud backup solution.
1. where's Apple advertising how safe your data is with iTunes sync?
2. the t-mobile problem was OLD TECHNOLOGY. It's using a hacked CE, which makes the device a peer, not a client. With push technology and SD cards nowdays, you can backup on the network in microincrements or backup to the SD Card. Again, the T-mobile problem is because they are using old Danger technology--the Android/Google setup would have not ended in the same manner if a Google DC went down or your device was blown (you can still backup to SD, which IMO is superior to iTunes sync).
(Also, could be why a good portion of the Danger guys went to Google for Android....)
I don't trust that. I backup my files every month or so by dragging this old hard drive home, then lugging it back to work.
http://www.avrupaestetik.com/burun_estetigi.html