daverea.com

If you’ve seen much of the tech press in the last few months, then you’ve probably heard about how great “cloud computing” is, and how it’s going to revolutionize computing by letting people do more stuff with fewer local resources (i.e. slower computers, smaller hard drives, etc).

What is really means is that you’re using resources – hard drive space, processing power, and the like – that are out on some server somewhere. The fact that you’ve got a high speed Internet connection between you and the server is the enabler, and suddenly you’re able to do all sorts of amazing new stuff. That’s all well and good.

Until something like this happens.

Apart from the inherent inefficiency of cloud computing, and the obvious and blatant privacy concerns, this is the primary reason you’ll never see me depending on “the cloud” for anything even remotely important: sometimes clouds go away. In this case, anyone who depended on the online photo storage site “Digital Railroad” has about 24 hours to pull their work offline before it disappears.

It’s sad that the company – someone’s hard work, investment and dream – has gone under. I’ve been there too, and it’s inevitably a dark time in one’s life. Hopefully, the photographers using Digital Railroad weren’t depending on it as primary storage – because in a matter of days, the server hard drives holding their photos will most likely be up for auction.

Think about that the next time someone tries to sell you on the virtues of cloud computing!