A Blog From Behind the Trenches

Personal hard drives crash, houses catch fire, and other disasters just like those at corporate locations. The only difference is that most server farms aren't run by people with little to no foresight. If i had to bet money, I'd bet every time that a corporate entity had more backups and more backup resources than an individual. Obviously and apparently this is not always the case. However, I personally won't lose faith in the concept because of the transgressions of a few.

This blog rocks! Thanks for the great posts!

Rafael writes:

What, did fearphage actually read the whole thing? Did it say anything about losing faith in the concept of cloud computing?

Quote about hosted services: "It's very useful to be able to do that. But am I going to rely on them to keep my data safe? No, I will always keep a backup of my own data, just in case."

Another quote: "Opera Unite will not replace traditional data hosts. It will not make all those data storage and sharing services obsolete."

Personal clouds, that sounds great. I can have my PC at home synchronized with my laptop and PC at office.

And it will be a worst scenario (which is sound impossible) if my house got in fire in the same time with my office.

Solution is called: folks at Google.

I'm not sure how Unite is supposed to help with this problem.

Strictly speaking, Unite isn't anything new. It was always possible to run a web server from your home computer -- Unite just makes it easier to set up. Unite is basically easy-to-use infrastructure for accomplishing that task. But where is the infrastructure in Unite for syncing to the cloud? How does Unite make that easier than it would be with Apache + PHP scripts?

There already is another approach, for which there is pre-existing infrastructure in many browsers (including mobile versions of Opera): client-side database storage. Your sites in the cloud maintain a local copy of their information on all the computers you use them on and enable client-side storage for. This gets you two wins: performance (since the network needs to be accessed less often to access information), and a local backup of your data.

(Edit: After re-reading your post, I realize that you've made a point about the privacy implications of having data in the cloud too. I think there are privacy downsides for both approaches. For example, if someone steals my laptop, they could theoretically access all of my information in Unite, but they can't access my information in the cloud because it is all password protected. Disk encryption might help with this, but that's unlikely -- effective attacks against it have been demonstrated using the DMA features of Firewire, etc)

Stephen Harbage writes:

Hey. I have enjoyed your blog post and your zealousness for an open free web : )
Please can you do a post on the EU and Microsoft agreeing the browser ballot. I think this is really important and you can help encourage people to check out the agreement and give feedback:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/10/microsoft-investigation-nears-end-as-eu-oks-browser-ballot.ars

Originally posted by haavard:

But I don't want other people to control all my data.

Not you, but average users might trust their data to Google more than to themselves. And it's not just a matter of trust, Google servers are probably much more reliable and easy to use than average user's home backup (many times even non existing).

I would suggest for Opera to unite Unite and Cloud.

For the average person I would guess they may know very little about how cloud computing works and trust that their data is all safe in one spot, this just shows to backup you data in some other spot

I wonder if T-Mobile will have its Sidekick users (not every T-mobile user has a side kick) come into a store so they can create a new backup