true that. plus, anyone with a half-inclination, a brain, and basic technical knowledge could access those files rather easily. or what if the servers went down for a day  and you needed your powerpoint for work? or if you had stored p1rated data, and the government decided to do a check on files. theres no security

Assassinator Wrote:

Senseito URΩBΩROS Wrote:or guarentee.

Imagine they had a freak data faliure and you had everything on it?

You'd be kicking yourself then... always good to know where your data is.

Actually, it'll probably be safer on their side than yours.

They probably use massive raid arrays that can withstand single HDD breakdowns, so unless multiple HDDs decide to break exactly at the same time, nothing will be lost. Additionally, since it's their business storing data, you can bet they will have backups.

On the other hand, the average user like you or me probably generally doesn't have either raid mirroring, nor backup. So if a HDD goes down, it's a trip to the data recovery place.

i have a raid array... but, in all honesty, ive never seen a hdd failure.

Assassinator Wrote:

trademark91 Wrote:i have a raid array... but, in all honesty, ive never seen a hdd failure.

Raid0 or Raid1?

I find that even when normal users have a raid array, most of the time it's raid0 to improve performance, rather than raid1 to improve safety.

Ge64 and Zinga for example both have raid0. And that only makes you even more vulnerable to HDD crashes.

raid1

yeah, it was an agonizing decision between raid0 and raid1. i eventually decided on raid1 because i wanted the data security more than i wanted the speedup from data striping

I'll stick with my laptop.  :)

id never use stuff like XDrive or Remote storage servers. An External Hard Drive is a lot less expensive in the long run (due to renting out the backup space) and you know physically where your files are. If anything just having a second har drive in your computer is even cheaper. I can only see Cloud Computing working where it does already, in business applications using ThinClients and PXE booting etc.. I don't know if there are Embedded Editions of Vista or Windows 7, i know there is of XP. The only reason cloud computing works in business is due to security (as the servers are their own, internal ones). Which really isn't necessary at home, and is unsafe because you're not the one who owns the server your stuff is hosted on.