Cloud file storage: what it means to own the data

Megaupload has been in the news recently when it was closed down for alleged copyright infringement. This caused a bit of a stir because some legitimate users lost access to their important data. It is definitely worth mentioning that this is certainly not the first time that a number of genuine users of a cloud-based file storage facility have been affected when the service has been closed down.

The moral of the story here is: MAKE SURE YOU OWN ALL OF YOUR IMPORTANT DATA

What does it mean to "own the data"? To me, it means that you have at least one copy of all of the data that you consider to be important on a disk to which you have physical access - such as on your laptop or desktop. Alternatively, on a disk or memory stick that you could plug into either of those.

If you don't own the data and the service hosting it goes away, you might lose the data forever. It would pay to make sure that your business does not depend on any such data as that would mean that someone else's failure could put you out of business.

This applies to your email too if you use GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. It seems unthinkable at this point that Google would stop providing their free email service but stranger things have happened. You might think this is just paranoia but the recent Megaupload incident certainly highlights the need not to be wholly dependent on one "cloud-based" service.