Over on SiliconBeat, I ran across their How big is Bloglines? story. Before I get into what I really wanted to say, I feel compelled to say that I think they (SiliconBeat) are doing a very good job of not only reporting what they learn, but also internalizing it. I really get a sense that they get what they're writing about. That doesn't always come across in journalist weblogs.
Keep it up, guys.
Now the interesting bit that jumped out at me is related to something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It was a quote they pulled from Paul Graham's book Hackers and Painters:
"The idea of 'your computer' is going away and being replaced by 'your data.' You should be able to get at your data from any computer. Or rather any client, and a client doesn't have to be your computer."
The more I find myself using increasingly larger and cheaper USB memory sticks, my colocated server, and on-line services like Flickr, I realize how my desktop and laptop computers are becoming less and less important in the grand scheme of things. And when I think about how popular web-based mail systems (Y! Mail, Hotmail, GMail) are, it's apparent that a lot of folks are keeping their data elsewhere.
So if we fast forward another year or three, where's most of your data going to live? On your hard disk? You iPod? A 32GB USB stick? Off in "the cloud"?
What do you think?
Posted by jzawodn at January 14, 2005 12:50 AM
First Post!!!
Just kidding, we're not in Slashland anymore Toto :-)
I had this same though recently, I'm a compulsive mass storage purchaser, currently Ive got 2X80GB, 2X120GB, 200GB 3.5i HDDS, plus 60GB, 40GB 2.5i HDDs, burnt DVDS, CDS, servers, USB, ZIP disks, Clik Disks(remember them) etc.
Dispite all that, there is probably <1GB of non-replaceable data that I'd like to have constant access to ( old source code, email archives, etc ). The question is replication or remote-access. Replication is fast but means you need a coalescing policy, remote access is satisfying technically but has other problems.
Brings to mind the old prediction of ultra high bandwidth resulting in one global computing device with practically infinite storage.
"Dispite all that, there is probably" ... only 1GB ( email archive, source code etc ) that is non replaceable.
Lyndon, exactly, I store all my essential data in a small 1gb pen drive (including portable Firefox/Thunderbird), which I take with me everywhere I go. Plus, frequent backups in DVD and that's it :D
Jeremy,
my data is going to live where it lives right now. on my laptop. it might be a different laptop from the one i use today, but it certainly will be one.
WM_MY0.02$
On a one petabyte hard drive stick thing. And even that won't be enough.
I think that communal storage will be excellent for common information. If I post a photo to Flickr, I can share it with friends without emailing copies to them, which only wastes space in their hotmail or gmail accounts (however vast this storage space may seem).
However, I think a personal computing device (in whatever form) will stay around for the same reasons that buses and trains haven't replaced individual cars everywhere. There's still that certain amount of our individual computing needs that we'll want to do privately. I think the next step will be more cases of a central server in the home, but that's just me.
I think this is an excellent posting !!
Firstly, I my data is spawned "across the cloud". I don;t care where it resides.. myflickr, typepad gmail or wherever.. However, I do care that I have access to this at any time. My solution was to download FF-Candidate1 for the USB stick. I ported all my cookies and now I have a nerdstick which I stick into any 'puter and vrooommmm.. ready to rock and roll.. Instance access.. the stickness is great.. no dependence on platform centric os... will be the next step.
Second, thinkly of the MacMini- lets say its my lunchbox and I carry it around w/me.. all I'll need is a wifi, k/b and a monitor.. !! the core resources will always be a personal "sidekick"
For home users, I think we'll see more non-critical data stored "out there somewhere" over the next few years, with memory sticks and the like being used to transport critical data back and forth between home and office.
The idea of "your computer" isn't going away any time soon, though. As with many things on the net, the issue boils down to trust: do we trust anyone to store all of our private data for us?
PS: I touched upon this topic in my blog recently.
I agree but want more. Please, someone take my office suite and put on a cloud. It's the one app I can't seem to shake, it's like a bad cold I can't get rid of.
Not surprisingly, I constantly find myself following this trend. I keep more and more of my data on three kinds of servers: home server, my shared hosting server, free or paid service-specific servers. I use USB flash frive to backup and keep crucial data with me, but I do not use it for an occasional file transfers, beacuse I do it by uploading files on a server and downloading it later.
I wrote a blog entry about my experince in managing e-mail, calendar, contacts, and bookmarks.
Allow me to be the dissenting voice in the eWilderness.
I'm not a real big fan of having my data distributed, where I not only can access it, but eventually be cut off from it. All the services you note are subject to either increasing fees, attack or simply being bought by Random Corp. (a wholy owned subsidiary of Evil Inc.) and being held hostage for various reasons. Hey, you signed up and missed that part about them owning distribution rights? Oh well.
Personally, I see folks increasing the amount of distributed storage they do, but also keeping a rather healthy stack of "archival" data for various personal and paranoid reasons.
Oh yeah, and I've got about 200GB of disk storage. I'm only using about 50GB of that, but it's nice to have the elbow room.
While it's likely that PCs/Notebooks will approach terabyte storage capabilities in 4 or 5 years, it is very possible that many of us will use something like xkey developed by Key Computing
JR - I share your caution but I think that as distributed services like this become more common, and as personal devices that are just alternative storage devices become more common as well, these will drive consumer expectations in the networked space as well and the market will punish entrants who deviate from some relatively open standard of accessibility.
The alternative is to replicate all of the services you gain from external service providers in-house, through a local server that can serve your web pages and do various other things all the while interacting with network-effects-laden services like Flickr and del.icio.us.
i use bloglines, gmail, and delicious ... that offloads a fair amound of what used to be on my pc.
i bought a cheap domain (~$100/yr) try out some web technologies, so even my "home projects" are partly out of the house.
sure, i can see such things continuing.
It's easy. Data that really needs to be kept secure will/should be stored remotely, and backed up locally. Data you need to use frequently is brought to your PC or mobile workstation (PDA?) as you need it. Data stored remotely (including e-mail) can be stored encrypted such that only the owner has access to it; it's just not done yet!
Greetings,
Actually, the 'offload my office suite' was done, once, in the VERY early days of Java, Corel built a complete office suite in Java, that actually worked as an applet as well as an application. Java was not yet ready for that kind of responsibility, and speed was always an issue, but that was prior to a lot of the modern JIT compilers and the like.
EOINA.
I haven't done the 'USB Life' thing yet, but that's because I have a laptop, which contains tens of thousands of my emails over the last few years. My primary email (and domain) is hosted by Verio so it's been 'distributed' anyway for the last 7 years, my secondary email is GMail. I do most of my personal development against Sourceforge's CVS servers, so my critical source code would survive the destruction of all my computers.
My bookmarks are still on each machine I own unfortunately (del.icio.us isn't integrated well enough into FireFox and Safari that I can see yet, and I haven't seen at all how to make it private), and browser history can't be shared across machines yet. I'd love to have really good, integrated, multi-browser bookmark *synchronization* across multiple computers that didn't require shutting down the browser when leaving each machine.
We want distributed-use data, but we also don't want lock-in. All the places that I have 'important data' are stored in open formats, using open protocols. Anything that doesn't meet that criteria won't be trusted to host something that is fundamentally MINE.
The market for 1TB drives won't go away, though. People will still want their pr0n on their hard drives, and not stored where anyone else can see it. :)
-- Morgan
I came to this same conclusion not too long ago. I wound up re-distributing my storage a bit, and wound up with a central ((file/web/ssh/e-mail/etc)/server)/router that does NFS and SMB, and then a backup box with rsync going across the two. I also placed everything in /srv/{nfs,smb,www,ftp} and then symlinked as needed. Then between all of my boxes, I've got SSH, NFS home dirs (SMB for the windows boxes), VNC (soon to be NX), with vsftp and apache with SSL (stunnel for others that don't support it). Add in some port knocking to open up things like SSH and VNC (as they aren't typically open to the general internet), and I can access anything, at any time, from anywhere, regardless of OS. Now, if I could afford two of these, then I'd be set for quite a while.
Jeez, how many times have we fought this centralization/decentralization war?
I've spent considerable effort trying to consolidate all my digital data and media on my 500Gb of local hard drives. And I can still access it from anywhere. There is no dichotomy between localized, centralized data vs. universal access. As long as my internet connection is up, my data is accessible. That's about the same as any other type of online data storage provider.
I'll be damned if I'm going to let someone else take care of my data out in some murky internet "cloud." I don't trust anyone to treat my data as seriously as I do, or take the same care in preserving it that I do. And there are other problems. I've spent years converting my favorite old vinyl records to mp3s, what's to stop the RIAA from suing a data haven to delete all unauthorized mp3s, and erasing the stored data I've legally made for my own use, from media I legally purchased? Count me out.
The central point made seems to be that data should be location indepenent, accessible from any client. This argument is a strong one but in my opinion doesn't go far enough. Given the increasing options available in the USB range it is becoming just as feasible to run an OS from a USB stick as it is to have the data on it. In fact there is even a distibution that will let you do this at the moment, Flash Linux, I've written a about this myself. Suffice to say that instead of just having your data available everywhere why not your favourite operating system and productivity applications as well?
Collecting and storing data is easy.
Reliable backup and restore is harder.
Applications that don't need installation is even harder.
Personal configuration of applications that can be taken and applied anywhere is the hardest.
Well, we all have some data in the cloud right now, right? I know I do. Some photos distributed on probably four sites, and some writings on a couple of sites, and some files stored on my Yahoo page, and so on. But none of this is critical or personal data. *That* kind of data *no one* is going to want "off in the cloud".
I think what we'll see, in an ultra-broadband world, is widespread use of Virtual Private Networks. Or to be more precise, Vitual Secure Networks. You'll have one for work and one for home. In maybe five years time we'll have, as someone else mentioned, *massive* storage capacity, and it'll be cheap. Think several terabytes, at least, in a box the size of a Mac Mini.
VERY GOOD ASSTISTANCE
Dear Sir,
VERY SECRETE AND CONFFIDENCIAL..
This letter may come as a surprise to you but after much consideration to the good recommendation made concerning you, we were left with no options than to contact with you. My name is Dr.HARRISON UCHBOR,the first son of Late MR. FREDICK UCHBOR. erstwhile governor of the Gold&Daimond Mining Company Accra-Ghana who unfortunately was among the casualties of the political crisis in Liberia, which savaged the nation for the period of ten Years.
Before his untimely death (via execution by the government) he informed us that while he was still the Gold&Daimond Mining Company Gornernor, he used his influence and position to lift some boxes containing U.S$11.5M out of the country, this he deposited with a certain security and trust company based in ACCRA-GHANA. According to him, when depositing the boxes, he declared to the management of the company that the contents were his family valuables, this is to ensure the safety of the funds.
We have already arrived in Accra-Ghana because our country has somehow become un-habitable for us, we decided to solicit for assistance for the following reasons:
1.To claim the boxes from the security companies
2.Assist us to invest the funds/recycling
3.Act as our partner and to also register all the investments in your name
4.Help us to relocate to a more secured place where we can continue with our academics. We will like to know more about you and also discuss how you will be compensated for your assistance.
We will in due time forward to you the documents covering the deposits for your perusal. As no one knows our present location, we implore you to treat this with utmost secrecy. You can get back to me with your fax and phone number,for oral discussion.
we anticipate your most urgent response.
Regards, Dr.HARRISON UCHBOR
Address:23 rd Accra-west legon.
Email:harrisuch@hotmail.com.
Tel:233 24 3301534.
VERY GOOD ASSTISTANCE
Dear Sir,
VERY SECRETE AND CONFFIDENCIAL..
This letter may come as a surprise to you but after much consideration to the good recommendation made concerning you, we were left with no options than to contact with you. My name is Dr.HARRISON UCHBOR,the first son of Late MR. FREDICK UCHBOR. erstwhile governor of the Gold&Daimond Mining Company Accra-Ghana who unfortunately was among the casualties of the political crisis in Liberia, which savaged the nation for the period of ten Years.
Before his untimely death (via execution by the government) he informed us that while he was still the Gold&Daimond Mining Company Gornernor, he used his influence and position to lift some boxes containing U.S$11.5M out of the country, this he deposited with a certain security and trust company based in ACCRA-GHANA. According to him, when depositing the boxes, he declared to the management of the company that the contents were his family valuables, this is to ensure the safety of the funds.
We have already arrived in Accra-Ghana because our country has somehow become un-habitable for us, we decided to solicit for assistance for the following reasons:
1.To claim the boxes from the security companies
2.Assist us to invest the funds/recycling
3.Act as our partner and to also register all the investments in your name
4.Help us to relocate to a more secured place where we can continue with our academics. We will like to know more about you and also discuss how you will be compensated for your assistance.
We will in due time forward to you the documents covering the deposits for your perusal. As no one knows our present location, we implore you to treat this with utmost secrecy. You can get back to me with your fax and phone number,for oral discussion.
we anticipate your most urgent response.
Regards, Dr.HARRISON UCHBOR
I'm curious, for those of you who store data remotely, how do you do it? Can it be free or inexpensive? I have a web/file server that I can SFTP to, but the only really practical transfer solution needs to have drive mapping. The only product I've found to do this securely is WebDrive, which is outrageously expensive. Any other ideas would be much appreciated!
I am currently backing up 278 Gigabytes of data every minute of every day. 100% confidence with the service provider. 448 bit encryption. Not even the provider can touch my data. Only me. It's the most cost effective and reliable I've seen.
If anyone should want more info. let me know.
The very idea of having a box in your house sitting around like some refrigerator will seem quaint in about 20 years. You will lease processing power/storage/bandwidth as your means allow, and access this via the REAL revolution which soon will take place: a revolution in input/output. No more keyboards and gadgets. True conversational operating systems & services. Subvocal command mic and ear dots implanted subcutaneously. Video ported to any available nearby screen, data glasses, or even data contacts.
I think it's amazing how people forget history. Sun and others pioneered the use of NFS to store user's home directories centrally, allowing the users to use any workstation and still see their desktop setup and the same data (even on diskless workstations).
This development stopped when Windows NT came along. I was pretty surprised in 1992 when I first used NT that there was no provision for this at all. It was a better windows98, not a better unix. So 15 years or so has been lost not thinking about a better NFS for the masses.
Anyway to answer Jeremy's question - the storage should be in the cloud.
Right now there is a new dilemma that didn't exist when nfs was being used. The local storage is abundant and cheap. So we have to use it. We need a smart internet server in every PC that manages local storage as well as smart caching and backup to the internet servers. Every file should appear as if it's local and all your frequently used files will actually be local. Files can be partially local and partially remote. When you start to use a huge file (like a movie), the server will automatically fill in the missing pieces using a swarm algorithm like bittorrent.
I try to describe this here:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-Y.5DkmA6erTpYek21zB0AQ--?p=63
Although I probably did a poor job of explaining what I mean.
