Where’s my data?
Jim Benson once again wrote something very insightful - I am detecting a pattern here. Free Services Are Unaccountable Stewards. If you rely on others to safeguard your data and make sure it is accessible to you when you need it, there is always an SLA involved. A Service Level Agreement - think about it, and look it up for the services that you use. Sometimes it’s just implied (usually with systems that don’t require a login like Google), in other cases there’s some legal language that defines the responsibilities and promises - or lack thereof. For example look at the Terms of Service over at Wordpress.Com. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts:
…in no event will Automattic, its suppliers or its licensors be liable to you or any other party for any direct, indirect, special, consequential or exemplary damages, regardless of the basis or nature of the claim, resulting from any use of the Website, or the contents thereof or of any hyperlinked website including without limitation any lost profits, business interruption, loss of data or otherwise, even if Automattic, its suppliers or its licensors were expressly advised of the possibility of such damages.
Automattic are the nice folks who make Wordpress.Com available for free. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with this language - it’s a free service. What I am pointing out is the risk that you take with your data here. Same goes for Jim’s Gmail example. Or del.idio.us. These are all free and therefore you’re mostly on your own.
Personally I am rather uncomfortable with that. My Gmail account is almost exclusively used for throw away email (registrations at web sites and other things likely to just attract spam). My main email address (hohndel.org) gets you to a server running in my office (server is a loose description - it’s a Mac Mini). My Wordpress based blogs run on that same server. I control where the data lives. I control the backup schedule. And yes, if power is out or my DSL link is down then my servers are down, too. That’s the price I pay. But at least my data is safe. Let me rephrase that. At least I control how safe my data is.
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I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?
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