Humyo cloud disappears from afternoon sky

<anti-cloud flame>

(the usual rant about not trusting other people with all your data)

Oh for heavens sake

I use Humyo. It is quite good, although the upload by adsl is tedious. It sounds like they had a bad experience and are doing everything they can to put it right. And, even you acknowledge, no data will be lost.

That's actually bloody clever of someone. Can you imagine any of the government systems managing to do that? in 60 to 120 minutes?

Look, it's not an iron lung. No-one died. It's not a missile shield or a near-earth-orbit asteroid database. It is where a lot of people hide slightly less than perfectly legal mp3 files, and their holiday snaps.

Why is it so absolutely, positively, definitely so essential that every bit of data in the world has to be available every existing microsecond? Libraries close at night and at weekends. The British museum is closed in the dark. Even the prime minister goes on holiday.

OK, so they fell down on some sales claim. Big deal. I never used it for anything where that mattered. In fact, I have always used it on the assumption they will go bust tomorrow and vanish in a puff of green smoke. And anyone who doesn't is a moron. Lets all get hysterical because the BBC made a claim that Johnathon Ross was funny, or because Golden Delicious apples are Greenish and Inedible. A few vorsprung durch technik motor cars go wrong. Are the rest of them useless as a consequence?

Its time to grow up. It's made by humans. It will be fallible. We do fallible oh so well

Paris, because she is fallible. And because you get less than it says on the box.

Just goes to show...

that cloud computing just feels like a major race to the bottom. If amazon's ec2 goes offline, a lot of businesses would topple and fail. And there is no guarantee that any cloud will stay online, of that if they have to go offline that they would do it nicely. Imagine what would happen if an overzealous Law Enforcement Agency seizes all of the servers in a cloud.

RE: Oh for heavens sake

Some of us are not human, we don't make mistakes. Please don't dirty all of us with your rotten views that inadequacy is OK. Its not!

There is a nice little saying that those who aspire for perfection use:

"A wise man learns by his mistakes, but a wiser man learns by others mistakes."

If you use this for everything you do in your life, you make surprisingly few mistakes.

If this bunch of monkeys did the same, understand, the Amazon Cloud and its chums makes mistakes rather regularly. Some of us know shit happens when it designed wrong, it doesn't happen if you invest properly in your plan and don't race it, unlike these and Amazon types.

Lets be fair, Cloud computing is simply wrong and a bad idea.

It is also billed as the primary source of your computing or data. The "stick it all here" type phrases are simply bad, misleading, stupido and asking for it.

Keep a local working copy, and "Sync it to this fluffy cloud" is a much better approach in this instance. But that wont sell will it!

SLAs?

Questions to Reg's Chris Mellor - or indeed any other informed source:

Does this vendor provide SLA agrements for their customers for the services(s) provided?

If so did this outage breach the required service level?

Secondly, does the vendor provide adequate support resources (staff, communications mechanisms) to handle the volume of interest and communication from their customers during a major outage?

What was the experience of users.. did they respond to emails and phone calls with timely, informative and reassuring messages during and after the outage?

I am constantly amazed at our (customers, potential customers) acceptance of very poor levels of service for "cloud services".

What happened to SLAs and decent support?

Why do service providers - from the "free" (ad-supported) through the low-cost and up to the expensive end - appear not to give a hoot about providing a decent level of customer service.

My experience has been that many of these orgs/companies just don't take customer support seriously.. and that many punters appear to accept the poor level of service as though it were "normal".

What do others think on this topic?

Ever tried emailing yahoo or google etc. and getting a human being to answer the question in a timely and useful way?

Steve.

Human nature

It is mostly a perception problem. just as people accept much higher risks by getting in their own car than they would on a train because *they* are in control, so it is with cloud vs local storage.

It seems their uptime is pretty good compared to to what you'd get with a local PC, plus you don't have to do all that security stuff yourself.

I'd have to agree though, if its just storage you're after, a USB flash drive sounds like quite a good alternative to the cloud.