Another good reason to not use the cloud?

[Clinton]

We've had a long and very interesting thread on cloud backups here. More than one post from there made the home page.

But is this another good reason to backup to local hard disk: 60 TB Hard Disk Coming ?

That would be enough space to save the whole internet (not that much of it is worth saving)!

[grynge]

That will be excellent my collection of stuff will fit on 3 hdd's though I pity losing one, it's bad enough when a 2tb crashes.

[JJMcClure]

Cool. I bet one day, when we're holding quadrillions of bits of data in quantum data storage so small you can't even see it, we'll look back at the idea of storing data as magnetised bits and laugh at how antiquated it was. Like making scratches in plastic might seem now... imagine.

I don't really think that the size of the storage medium has any relevance to the argument about whether it's better or not to store data locally or dispersed in the cloud. That's still open to debate. 1Tb or 60Tb, it's still subject to the same concerns.

The future of computing - future-of-computers-quantum.html the physics of which I don't pretend to understand..

[Chabrenas]

That would be enough space to save the whole internet (not that much of it is worth saving)!

As JJMcClure has pointed out, having the capacity to do your own backups is not sufficient. Business Continuity (what we used to call Disaster Recovery) good practice requires that data be stored somewhere unlikely to suffer from the same disaster that corrupted or destroyed the original data. If you do your own backups, you should at least do them to a device that you then unplug, since power surges are a major cause of failure for electronic media.

You should also cycle two or more devices for the backups, since the disaster could occur during the backup process, possibly corrupting the previous level of backup if it's on the same device. If you're serious, you should store them in a different location. This is the point at which it becomes more cost effective to outsource the job, unless you already have access to host sites in different locations, effectively running your own cloud.