Does Everybody Love a Cloud?

A song got stuck in my head the other day.  The old Gary Lewis and the Playboys hit, “Everybody loves a Clown”, except I kept hearing it as “Everybody loves a Cloud”.

Immediately after the line, ‘Everybody loves a clown, Gary Lewis retorts with “But why don’t you?”  With my head still stuck in the clouds, my answer is that I am scared to death of some clouds.  I’m scared of the big ones.  The Amazons and the DropBoxes and the Facebooks. They are huge and are very attractive targets to crackers, spammers and spies.  But more importantly for me is being forgotten among their bigger fish. I am just a small user, one of millions. And I’m not convinced that these big cloud providers care about me and my information.  If they lose .001% of their customers’ data, it may not be a big deal, but that .001% could be all of my files. And that is a VERY big deal for me. 

Along those lines, I just read an article about Box that really freaked me out.  Seems like some poor guy had his account deleted and all of his files disappeared.  And that brings up the simple point I want to make: with the emergence of the Cloud, people think backup is no longer necessary.  They are completely safe and fully equipped with their files in the Cloud. It is as if with your data in the cloud and in SAN snapshots, and in virtual machines, there is no longer a need to back it up.

And that makes me think of the old Smokey Robinson tune, “Tears of a Clown”. If you want to be a happy clown, do not trust saving your data in a single location.  The cloud is great, in fact Acronis provides a cloud for clients to store their backups with Acronis Backup & Recovery.

Acronis even believes the value of the cloud is so great that it, enables clients to develop their own backup cloud with Acronis Storage.  However, we only trust a cloud as far as we can throw it, and you’d be a fool to keep your data in only one place. Follow the 3-2-1 rule. Keep three copies of your valuable data, on two different types of media, and one copy at a remote location.  If you follow those rules your data will be safe.  Read the Box article, even though the story is about someone having a third party delete his files, he did maintain another copy.  So in the end, he was a happy clown.

You too can be a happy clown.  Use the cloud, it is a great tool. You can economically store files and have access to them anywhere and at anytime. So embrace the new cloud technology, but do so wisely and be sure to backup those critical files.  

After all, everyone loves a clown, but not a fool.