Computer

Related to my last entry, here is a short video about the power of Open Data.

Now which the public being able to assume a role of a gatekeeper to channel the evergrowing stream of information, I better keep in mind: Never trust the statistics that you did not forge yourself. Increasing mediacompetence and questioning the sources will probably be key-abilities in the future.

I have been wondering for a while about options to back up my collection of photos and other important data that I do not want to loose. These days I am hardly using an optical drive anymore, so burning DVDs is not really a future proof option. Also it can get tedious to back up new pictures. I was most tempted to get a local backup-solution like an external hard-drive or network-attached storage system (NAS). This does appeal to the nerd inside me of course. More hardware to play with. But still that was not easing all my concerns. What if someone breaks into my room or there is damage due to water or fire. It might seem a bit far fetched, but it is still a concern that I have.

I am already using Dropbox to sync my important and/or mostly needed data between my computer and laptop. It was really useful when I was in Taiwan as well. I just arrived there, got my workstation and after having installed the client and going out to lunch I had all my data (and some music) already available. But the paid storage on Dropbox is too pricey. I would buy more hard-drives for a local backup for that money. (If you want to test Dropbox, feel free to use my referrallink for some extra free space).

Anyways, now I am paying a really reasonable price for a network storage with a German company (but I do not feel like advertising for them, still testing). I got 100GB storage space and I can connect to it using a multitude of secure protocols. And currently I am backing up all my pictures there. This will take quite a while.

But I got me thinking: I do occasionally upload my pictures to Google’s Picasaweb to share them with my friends. If I run out of space there, I can buy more space from them. Wouldn’t it be a nice solution if I could connect Picasaweb or flickr to my netstorage? I would be keeping my data on my drive and grant those services access to my storage in order to use them. I could use Google Documents or Zoho to work on my office files and keep them in one location.

By keeping the data in one place, I could simply change from using Picasaweb or flickr to another third service without having to upload all my pictures again. With the Cloud-Concept getting more and more popular, I hope to see more flexible solutions being developed. Instead of giving your data to one of the big companies with a multitude of services like Google or Apple or uploading it maybe redundantly to various locations, it would be preferable to keep my data in one spot that I control and still use the various services to work with my data.

Also developers of web-applications would benefit from this. Instead of competing about attractive solutions for the user to upload and store the files that the application is working with, the developer can focus more on enhancing the actual service.