Nik Butler (aka @loudmouthman) posted the above question on twitter yesterday and it provoked a lively debate about the nature of the Cloud and the implications for us all in terms of our data security.  For me, the Cloud doesn’t change a great deal.  My email has always been in cloud.  I did run an Exchange Server until a couple of months ago, but this was fed by a mailserver in the cloud anyway.  So learning how to cope with a Cloud service was something that I dealt with from pretty much the word go.

But it does prompt a serious question.  Especially after twitpic has been down for the whole day today.  I use twitpic most days, and link to it everywhere and I have been building up a pretty good collection of the plates of food that I cook.  Today I have been getting messages from people saying they couldn’t see my twitpics.

Coincidentally, yesterday I started posting  my phone photos into friendfeed, and phreadz along with twitpic in one email.  So today I could use my friend feed image url.

Posting phone photos with a Nokia N95 is so easy to do using gmail that it just has to be done.  However, it was only today when twitpic went down that I realised this was actually a good move.  There are obvious benefits to cross posting in multiple locations, spreading readership being a major one.  Especially in this case, as friendfeed is still not the place where everyone hangs out and Phreadz is still invitation only, although my Phreadz channel is now public.  So I do not pollute the same audience in any location, meaning I am spreading my readership by posting in all those locations.  At least I hope.

But what this also does, is backup your images in multiple locations.  It makes sure you have a full stream of all your images in a redundant manner, guarding against a service going pop, whether financial or from some kind of attack or incident.

If twitpic never comes back up from this, and currently it is still not backup, I have lost all of my food photos, and most of the images that I have taken on a daily basis and posted from my phone or laptop since the service began.  OK, I am over reacting here and luckily I also have them backed up on a few drives in my home.  So it is not the end of the world.

Twitpic will come back up and be working again and will hopefully be far stronger for it.  For the whole time I have been using twitpic, it has been an awesome service and I’ve never noticed it to be down before.  But this does highlight the need for redundancy, in multiple locations.  Have a backup in the Cloud.  In fact, have multiple Cloud backups in multiple locations.  If they are free services, like twitpic, even better!

My original answers to Nick’s tweet from last night would still be the same:

@loudmouthman surely that’s the benefit of the cloud? live data in one location, backup data in another physical location.

and

@loudmouthman no one said that putting data in the cloud means you have to trust your provider to run backups. nothing changes there surely?

So there we have it.  The cloud is a great place.  Excellent free services.  Don’t assume anyone just backs up your data.  And if you can’t access that service, or it goes down, will you miss that data? Backing up data still has to be done. We just have more options.