We hear a lot of talk about how cloud computing is the future. Those of us who still run some of our own internet infrastructure are increasingly seen as slightly eccentric and old-fashioned. Why would anyone host their own mail server when we have Gmail or run their own blog when there is WordPress or Posterous. In fact, why have your own server at all when you can just use Amazon EC2?
Well during September I was reminded of the downside of the cloud when I almost lost two old blogs.
One of the earliest blogs I wrote was on the use.perl web site. Yes, it all looks a bit ropey now, but back in 2001, it was cutting edge stuff. Everyone in the Perl community was using it. But it never really had a service level agreement. It was run on someone’s employer’s network. And, of course, that was never going to last forever. Earlier this month he announced that he was leaving that job and the use.perl would be closing down. Currently, I think that the site is in read-only mode and there are some people in the Perl community who are trying to set up alternative hosting for the site. I hope that comes off. There’s almost ten years of Perl history stored up in that site. It would be a shame to see all those URLs turn into 404s.
And then there’s Vox. I never really used Vox that heavily, but I dabbled with it for a while. And now it’s also closing down. Six Apart put in place some procedures to transfer your blog posts to TypePad, but for reasons I couldn’t work out, that didn’t work for me. What I really wanted was to import the data into this blog (which runs on Movable Type, another Six Apart product) but for some reason that option wasn’t available. In the end I managed to import the posts into Posterous, but I seem to have lost all of the tags (not really a problem) and the comments (a pretty big problem), Oh, and I’ve just noticed that the images are still being hosted on Vox. Better fix that before Vox closes down – tonight.
So I’ve learnt an important lesson about trusting the cloud. It’s all very well putting your data up there, but be sure that you have an exit strategy. Find out how you can get your data out. And how much of your data you can get out easily. I put all of my photos on Flickr, but I keep copies locally as well. But the again, that’s not really enough is it? Sure I’ve got the photos, but if Flickr closes down tomorrow, I won’t have all the social interactions that have built up around my photos.
These scares have made me start to think about these issues. And I’ve been tracking down some other old stomping grounds. I’m pleased to report that my first ever blog (hosted by Blogger, which is now owned by Google) is still available.
Where’s your data? How much could you reconstruct if Facebook closed down tomorrow?
Funny you should bring this up because just last week I was thinking the same thing about several websites I use. One is Songkick which has my extensive gig history which I would really not want to lose. The other is Listal where I store all the books I’ve read, books I want to read, and films I’ve seen.Listal at least does have an XML export, but I couldn’t find anything similar for Songkick.