Weathering The Storm Clouds

As you may know, the Sony Playstation Network was just recently brought back to life after being forced to shut down for almost a month due to meddling hackers.  I am not a gamer, but can just imagine how frustrating that must have been to not have access to those multi-player games, movies and more.  I know whenever Gmail or any of it's related services like Google docs or calendar gets knocked offline I start pulling my hair out.

And people are becoming more and more dependent on storing their files on the Internet.  Over the past two months both Amazon and Google have announced cloud based music services and just this week at the Google I/O conference the Chrome Books were unveiled which virtually can't function without web access, although some local storage is included and a few apps will be able to work offline.

Which brings me to the point of this blog entry.  No matter how bad you want it, don't allow everything you own to live in the cloud.  For sanity's sake, make backups or keep the originals on a local drive because you never know when those storm clouds will threaten.

One last thought before I leave.  How about one of you super smart developers out there make an "umbrella" app of sorts.  For example, whenever I create something online there's also an automatic option that pops up to download it to the machine I'm currently working on.  Emphasis on the word "option!"

What do you think?