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Your Hard Drive in the Cloud
Cloud computing may a little over-promised, but it isn’t “worse than stupidity,” as Richard Stallman would say. In fact, it’s really a very positive change in the way we use computers. Not only does it eliminate many of the barriers to using any operating system you want, but it also takes the responsibility of storing and backing up data off of the user. This is all in a very early stage, but the glitches should be worked out in a few years.
Unfortunately, it’s very hard for people to create successful web applications without backing from companies like Google and Microsoft. The problem is that when you start using, for example, Google Docs, it is very hard to switch to Zoho Office. You certainly can’t use both to edit the same documents as you could if they were stored on your hard drive. This means that you are locked into using a single application, naturally leading most of us to pick the one we trust the most. This problem also blocks out a lot of the hobbyist open-source projects that might otherwise appear as web applications.
What we need is a “hard drive in the cloud”: a personal storage space from which documents could be opened with any web application. For example, someone could create a document in Google Docs and save it to their “hard drive in the cloud.” Then, they could open that document from Zoho Office and continue working on it there.
The problem with this plan is that it would require an established web application vendor to adopt it before anyone would bother to use it, and no major web application vendor has an incentive to adopt a system which would make it easier for their customers to switch the a different service.
How will we get data portability in the cloud when companies like Google have it in their interest to prevent any such project?
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I’ve been using a Linux virtual Drive to get access to my Google Docs on Linux. I can open these files in OpenOffice – works very nicely. I can use the same service from the web to open the document in Zoho and edit and save back to Google Docs ! You can see a video of the Linux cloud drive at http://bit.ly/cNDFI4
[author]: “You certainly can’t use both to edit the same documents as you could if they were stored on your hard drive. This means that you are locked into using a single application….”
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I understand your point, but both Zoho and Google Docs support the ISO-standard ODF (open document format) for its files, so yes, you can use either one to edit the same documents. The obstacle is that you would have to have them uploaded to each different web suite account, or use a local version of the web suite. Amazon’s S3 storage is more for developers, but it’s a rough “HD in the cloud” in a simple backup way.
Cloud computing is going to get exciting in the future. Right now, Gmail is the best example for both users and businesses of a current success. No one is saying that cloud computing will ever be exclusive to data and document management, i.e., you will always want a local storage device — even if it’s a network — to store you data and thus have an offline backup!
“…but it also takes the responsibility of storing and backing up data off of the user”
Yeah right. Like I trust any GloboCorp to be responsible…
If you put YOUR responsibility to back up YOUR data in someone else’s hands, you’ll eventually find out how stupid that idea really is.
Ever so sorry, but I subscribe to the ‘worse than stupid’ lobby. I can really see advantages to automated back-up to a ‘cloud’ drive, but that is about it………