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Personal cloud to replace PC by 2014??

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OS X Mountain Lion will integrate more cloud services, but I don't expect I'll use them. I might have done, if I had more than one computer, but the only other thing I have is an iPad and I don't use any app with it that requires documents. The aforementioned DropBox, plus my address book contacts, that's the only cloud thing I expect I'll ever need. But if more people do need it, that's fine. Nobody's forcing anyone. Clouds will not replace decentralized computing.

Thus far, no one has made a home solution that's "so easy a caveman can do it."

NOT COOL! ;)
 
http://img.ponibooru.org/_images/82...bow_dash scootaloo spike twilight_sparkle.png

But, on a serious note. What if any Cloud related server did blow out, a power surge, etc that did damage a key component of it? alright it won't shut the thing down, but delays and connections being cut would mean thousands are without their data.

I have plenty of blank DVD's, they suit me fine.

It would be a pretty shoddy "cloud" system that irrecoverably lost data. Of course, I'd check to see what sort of technology and redundancy I'm getting for the money, were I paying for a cloud service. ;)

With some, you are responsible for your own backups. They just need to be clear about what sort of redundancy they provide and what kind of uptime they guarantee.
 
I would never use a cloud as a backup. What happens if Internet service goes down? I much prefer to get a cheap hard drive and let Time Machine handle it.
 
That's kind of what I was hinting at, not all companies and services offer a Cloud so far, and will have quite a few teething problems during the setup, which will make transition on a large scale to clouds difficult and costly at first.

I barely even use the iCloud at the moment.
 
I personally don't like these cloud companies all clambering to get our data. Seems a little too creepy to me. The goal of any company is to make the most profit possible. The big question is - do they make more money from users paying for the service, or from other marketing companies who want access to all that data so they can perform market research? I'm thinking the latter. They can claim that they hold their servers to the highest privacy standards, but does anyone ever actually read through the mile-long ELU to see if that is truly the case, or if there are any caveats and exceptions to privacy statements?
 
I much prefer to get a cheap hard drive and let Time Machine handle it.
Can Apple get anything right? My time machine doesn't require the use of cheap hard drives. When I lose my data, I simply travel back, sneak in during the night and steal the data from my younger unsuspecting self.

Funny though, once the hard drive broke exactly when I was trying to copy it back – turns out my rescue attempt had damaged the data in the first place.
 
Satalite would no doubt be prohibatively expensive.

It's actually not as bad as a lot of cable monopolies. Satellite internet starts at $70 and goes up from there if you want speed. The downside, is that it's a shared connection (obviously) and latency is horrific (due to the speed of light, it takes NOTICEABLE time to bounce the signal off the satellite).

If you already have DSL, then it's going to be slower. If you're stuck on dial-up, it's still a quantum leap above what you have.
 
I personally don't like these cloud companies all clambering to get our data. Seems a little too creepy to me. The goal of any company is to make the most profit possible. The big question is - do they make more money from users paying for the service, or from other marketing companies who want access to all that data so they can perform market research? I'm thinking the latter. They can claim that they hold their servers to the highest privacy standards, but does anyone ever actually read through the mile-long ELU to see if that is truly the case, or if there are any caveats and exceptions to privacy statements?

iCloud is free. So is DropBox (at least at the kind of capacity that most users will ever need). So there's no real profit motive here.
 
iCloud is free for 5GB only, then you have to pay for every new increment of storage after that, and they aren't cheap.
 
I know there are a lot of sceptics about this, but when interstellar self-designed nanoscale von Neumann nebulas replace the cloud in a decade, the naysayers will be eating their hats.
 
I know there are a lot of sceptics about this, but when interstellar self-designed nanoscale von Neumann nebulas replace the cloud in a decade, the naysayers will be eating their hats.

They won't, as their hats will be in the cloud, like the rest of their former property.
 
Oh! but that nebula will condense and turn into a star and then toast our data AND our hats!:klingon:
 
Cloud computing is about gov't control of information.

When information is distributed across hundreds of millions of hard drives, flash drives, and other devices around the world in people's houses and what not, governments can't see nor control most of it.

When it's all in the cloud... they can see, control, and remove all of it as they see fit. Make no mistake, gov'ts are trying to push the cloud.

My own two cents: I don't think local hard drives will ever fully go away.
 
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