Livin' In The Cloud

The "cloud" is so over-hyped.  I'm not a big fan of doing things "in the cloud".  I'll take a local application over a thin client any day.

But putting data on-line is another matter.  How I love being able to drop my data in one spot and access it from anywhere with an Internet connection.  So cool.  I'm too cheap to pay for any sort of remote storage, but I've put a few good free alternatives to use.

The first was the Amazon Cloud Player.  This came about as a necessary way to get music onto the Kindle Fire.  The uploader works well, and the upload process took about two days.  You get 5 GB free, and I think I filled about 4 GB with my on-line collection.  It's not my whole collection, but a reasonable chunk of it for use on the Fire.  One cool feature was that tracks purchased from Amazon didn't have to be uploaded - they were automatically recognized and linked to the Cloud Player without any user input.

More recently, Google kicked-off their Play service.  The free music storage is much more generous on Play - up to 20,000 songs, each as big as 250 MB.  Sweet.  Google's uploader worked well too, and now my whole music collection is on-line and accessible everywhere.

I'm also in the process of taking advantage of Google's PicasaWeb albums to back up my photo collection.  This is no small collection, and backing it up is no small task.  Fortunately, the Picasa application is handling most of the work, but I did have to do a little bit of up-front prep to take advantage of their free storage.

PicasaWeb gives you 1 GB of free storage.  This is pretty much useless for storing any significant number of photos.  However, if you resize everything so that the image size is 2048x2048 (or less) then you can store those images for free!  Picasa will even do this resizing for you as it uploads, if requested.

The one limitation on this system is that uploaded photos go into an album, and albums are limited to 1,000 pictures.  There's no limit on the number of albums you can have.  Before I started uploading I split my photos into folders with 1,000 pictures or less, and currently I'm only about 4 folders (4,000 images) away from having everything on-line!  This will be about a 12-day upload when I'm done, but it could have been completed faster.  I've turned on a "Conserve Bandwidth" option in Picasa to throttle the upload so I don't affect other applications on the network.

I recognize that you get what you pay for with these kinds of services.  Although I like having data backed up "off site", I have no expectation that this data is 100% safe just because I've put it on-line.  I received no guarantee from Amazon or Google, and I realize that, which is why I have three different hard drives with all of my pictures here at home, and all of my CD's are still around if I need to go back to my original music.  Even so, it's nice to have everything conveniently available via the web, and even if it's not a guaranteed backup I still consider it another line of defense against the unthinkable: Total Data Loss.