There’s been a lot of talk about “the cloud” over the past decade as cloud computing services became more cost effective and readily available. I knew it had made common vernacular when my 80+ year old stepfather asked me about it.
“The cloud” is just a way of saying “someone else’s computer.” There’s no magic there. It’s just giant banks of computers that maintain data for lots of people. The advantage is that the cloud services are much bigger than what businesses and individuals can support for themselves, and they have security and failover services.
Cloud storage services, though, are a very different animal from content services. Cloud storage is essentially giant hard drives you can access. Content services, though, takes your data and serves it up to the world.
“Don’t Give Your Content To Facebook”
Back when I started blogging there was a lot of talk about where bloggers should host their content. Some people advocated for using one of the blogging platforms like Blogger or LiveJournal. Some people advocated setting up your own website and hosting it there. Still others were adamant that you could reach more people by putting all your content on Facebook.
The problem that arose very quickly was one of content ownership. If you put your work on someone else’s platform for publishing, do you still own it?
And then there was always the possibility of one of these platforms taking the content down without warning.
The consensus in the blogging world could be summed up with “don’t give your content to Facebook.”
Apps That Store Your Data
The same concerns are valid with any service that stores your data. You put a fun little video on Instagram. You share a recital video on YouTube. You store your recipes in an app. You save clips of how-to instructions in a notetaking app.
The apps are everywhere, and so is our data. And what happens if you suddenly lose access to the apps?
(Don’t say it couldn’t happen: CloudNordic was forced to shut down after ransomware wiped out its system and destroyed customer data; CodeSpaces was hacked and customer’s data and backups deleted; and the list is long and horrifying. Don’t Google it unless you want your peace of mind disrupted)
The sad fact is that you can lose your data stored in other people’s apps at any time.
The lesson here is “don’t give your data solely to an app.”
How Much Are You Comfortable Losing?
I was listening to a podcast recently that posed the question about how much are you comfortable losing in the context of investments. The podcast wasn’t about data, but I immediately went there. My profession is data, after all.
While I routinely backup my computer (files to two cloud services; photos to three cloud services), I haven’t been paying attention to all the data that I am storing inside of apps.
The question of how much I am comfortable losing made me uneasy, because the data stored in the apps is not backed up anywhere. One attack on any of them and I would lose a lot – some of it important.
I Left Evernote Because of This…
In 2021 I left Evernote because of sporadic problems in the software. It took me a while to figure it out, but I moved to OneNote and Trello.
One of the reasons I chose OneNote was that I was confident I could extract the data programmatically if I had to. I still probably could, but it would not be easy and would involve a lot of swearing.
So even though I left a system, I was still stuck with other software. And the data was stuck in the apps.
Getting Data Out of Our Apps
I’ve started working on getting my data – at least the stuff that was important out of my apps. Over the next few weeks, I will talk about locating the apps with data, how to decide what to extract, and some specifics of how I pulled data out of the apps.
Until then, though, start thinking about how much you would lose if an app suddenly went away.
