The logic about backup seems quite flawed here. Buy a device to keep it at home vs. have Google or EMC store it for you? Safe to say, if there is a fire in my house, the computer AND the backup drive are goners. If I back up using an on-line service, their servers are backed up elsewhere too, so presumably, if they have a fire or an issue, your documents won't be gone forever. You may have temporary access issues, but the odds of it being gone forever are much smaller than keeping on your own computer...
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"For example, many users accidentally mark their Google calendars (another free service) as public, and everybody is now able to search them," he said. "You typically find sensitive information like conference calling dial-in numbers, or even bank account and PIN numbers online."
The tradeoffs involved
Said Pescatore: "Both from a reliability and a security perspective, you trade away some reliability and some security, some safety, by using these free, cloud-based services rather than by doing it all on your own PC.
"For most consumers, Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail, those have actually gotten pretty good from a security perspective. It's really not much of a risk. The real issue is availability — the service might go out for two or three hours; you never know," he said.
"The other thing is if something were to crash, or, say Google or Yahoo or any of these people have a fire and everything burns up — well, your photos are gone, your e-mail is gone, there are no guarantees.
"It's really nice having free stuff," Pescatore said, "but there is a cost."
And even though MobileMe is not free, it is relatively inexpensive for the services it offers, once the bugs are worked out, and so long as those services are available to customers.
"For consumers, any of these Web-based programs, Gmail or Flickr — where you might store your photos instead of on your own computer — what you're getting is a really powerful thing pretty cheap, right?" Pescatore said.
"And the old saying, 'You get what you pay for,' even in this Internet age, still holds. You should go into these things knowing you're making a tradeoff: 'OK, it's going to be free, but there might be a day where there will be an outage, and I can't use this.' "
Which brings us back to backups, especially for home users. No matter where you have your e-mail, digital photos, documents, videos and music — back them up, either on your computer and/or to an external hard drive.
Prices of backup drives are pretty reasonable — a 500-gigabyte external hard drive can be less than $150 — and well worth the peace of mind should a cloudy day come along.
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