Free Cloud Backup for Comcast Customers

[LowTech]

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[color=orange]Like so many others I’m weary of this whole cloud computing thing. Massed storage depots like Comcast et al will surely become common targets of hackers since they will become such large and “juicy” targets that they’ll be too tempting to resist.  Even if they don’t bring the cloud servers to a crawl the viruses/Trojans/worms/bots that they will no doubt attach to some of those treasured family pictures or corporate PDFs stored within the cloud servers will create havoc among those who go back and open one of their saved files.  I have no confidence, what so ever, that currently available or “around the corner” technology exists that can/will adequately protect the stored data in these massive offsite storage facilities.  Even if the automated security does exist there is still the human element involved which can fail.  I’m acutely aware to the human element failure due to my employer’s benevolent act of disclosing my name and SSN (along with about 14000 other victims) to hackers last year due to lax security procedures and poor managerial oversight.  What a bunch of dorks! 

Furthermore I don’t believe that cloud computing will be the future of digital storage and computing.  The future, IMHO, lies with portable memory.  Already I can duplicate my browser on any desktop simply by plugging in a USB flash drive that has Firefox Portable Edition loaded in it but that’s not enough.  For one thing we need for the new USB 3.0 standard and/or eSATA become more main stream so that speed is not a limitation.  Voluminous portable memory has to become more affordable so that keeping your browser, word processor, media player, data files, security suite, etc on a thumb sized devise is practicable.  The 256GB Kingston Data Traveler is a nice starting point (albeit at an $1100.00 price tag).  At that point you can carry around a good chunk of your office on your keychain.  Any additional/unexpected data which may be required will available from your personal/company server over the web.

Providing your own server won’t necessarily make you any more secure but I do believe that a schooling fish approach (i.e. everyone/every company runs their own server) will result in fewer victims overall than these massed offsite storage schemes proposed by the cloud computing advocates since attacks will be limited to small servers.  Whereas an attack on one small family/business server would result in a relatively low number of computers being affected a similar attack on a mass storage facility could potentially impact thousands of computers and their users.  Of course I realize that a determined hacker/malware author will go after the server O/S looking for a broader impact rather than attacking an individual server but I believe that personal the protection suites or combinations available are reasonably capable of providing decent protection for the low volume/small servers out there. 

Maybe I’m too jaded to embrace cloud computing and storage as I currently see it but until the cloud computing advocates can convince me that their solution is better and safer than my ability to safeguard my data (remember I can unplug my server if all else fails) then I’ll just stick with my old tried and true backup schemes for now, TYVM. 
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