Analyzing Personal Data Cloud storage: The responsibility of cloud service provider

The advantages and risks of putting commercial data into cloud storage are discussed in the previous section. In this chapter, we will focus on some of the issues of personal use of cloud storage. Cloud storage can provide a new storage option for users whose data is growing fast, and users who want to put photos, music libraries and other personal data online can have many options, including free and fee-based services.

Free online photo storage services include Flickr, Snapfish and Photobucket. Free online music storage services include MP3tunes and musicplayer.fm. Free, multi-purpose storage services include xdrive and box.net. Of course, these are just examples-there are actually quite a lot of free online storage services. For fee-based services, Smugmug,carbonite,upline and Mozy are available for online storage, charged by month.

Message store

For now, a large capacity free email service like Gmail has attracted some users to use them as personal data repositories. However, Fastservers.net, a spokesman for the company in Chicago, said that storing the data in an e-mail account might not be the ideal approach for those who are safe-minded.

"You can't classify Gmail as a real storage solution unless you're going to use a mailbox and send yourself email with a lot of attachments so that data can be accessed at home--that's a bad idea." Bush said to Technewsworld. "For consumers who want to save photos, important files and MP3 files without having to download them again from itunes, Carbonite and mozy are good products for home users," Bush advises. ”

The price of a charged online service is about 5 dollars a month. Bush added, "This money may be trivial for users, but it can get a higher level of service from a free service." ”

Responsibility of the service provider

"What data can users put into the network to store?" It takes us to imagine. " Bush commented: "You might be surprised if you know what some consumers are saving in their backup system." One of the consumers we know keeps their Internet Explorer favorites because he has been using them for the past five years and he can't do business without them. ”

Business users need to store financial data, product documentation, and other classified business in a backup, Bush said. "For individual users, most of the data that needs to be saved is photos, videos and music." Newer computers come with a repair disc, and you can quickly reload the system when you open it.

"In addition, Microsoft Windows has many recovery points, so users can quickly restore data to a specific point in time when they need to recover data." Apple's leopard operating system comes with a time machine software that can help users recover photos, music, movies, TV shows and documents, and so on. He added.

Rob Enderle, chief analyst at Enderle Group, said: "There are some potential legal consequences of storing data online." "Music is always difficult to determine, especially when a website allows music to be shared, it may have violated the license of the music itself." Enderle said to Technewsworld. "Most photo sites allow sharing, although more and more people are using social networking sites for this purpose." "It is also important to consider the accountability of storage vendors."

"The responsibility of the service providers for selling backup storage is changeable, and that is where consumers need to be aware." "The user needs to know the rules, and some of the service providers in the industry are not responsible for your proprietary data," he advises. So make sure you work with a vendor that actually protects your data, not with a service provider that simply makes bad checks. The replicator should have a recovery plan, a replication solution, and multiple redundancy of the online storage service to avoid data loss from hardware corruption or catastrophic events. ”

The problem of sudden accident

The problem with cloud storage is that the cloud may disappear, Haff said. "The cloud stores to some extent guarantee that the backup data will never happen unexpectedly, even if the company has some sort of a mistake or the company is out of business," Illmuminata's chief it advisor Gordon Haff told Technewsworld, "but there is no point in this assurance, Because cloud storage is often used by large companies that provide enterprise-class applications. Moreover, even if an accident occurs, it is only the loss of the backed-up data, which is less harmful than the loss of the source data. The premise is that users also retain their source data. ”

"Consumers should save their own data backups on USB drives or other storage media," Haff recommended. "The best solution is to use a more redundant system: using local and offline backups, synchronizing data and archiving data," said Roger Kay, chairman of the Endpoint Technology Association, to Technewsworld, "in addition, many services provide automated archiving services, You can crawl live data from a disk array and periodically copy it to tape. ”

The storage company does not allow users to sue them for loss of data, Kay said. "But, obviously, the impact of losing user data on their business is fatal." ”