Sunday, May 15, 2011

Google's Blogger Outage Not a Reason to Abandon The Cloud

Google's Blogger suffered from a significant outage toward the beginning of the week. During maintenance/update the service suffered widespread disruption preventing people from accessing their Blogger accounts for a while. To restore the service they had to temporarily remove the last few days of posts. As a Blogger user myself, I can attest that it was a bit of a pain. The lack of access and reset caused a few scheduled posts trigger incorrectly and prevented me from updating for a while.

As 'horrible' as that experience was, it is still no reason to abandon the cloud. As far as I can tell, the worst group hit suffered about a day of not being able to update, and maybe two days before lost posts were restored. To put that in perspective; in roughly eight years of service their worst outage was a days worth of no access, a few days worth of posts inaccessible for two days, with no data lost and everything restored and back to normal in two days.

Now ask yourself what your offline track record has been in those same eight years. How many of your hard drives have cashed or been corrupted? How many memory cards, cds/dvds, and flash drives have you lost? How many of your files are stuck on floppy disks or in formats that are now outdated or unreadable? If you can honestly answer that you have never lost anything, always kept the files in up to date formats on up to date media, and never had anything break on you, you have not matched up to Google's Blogger cloud yet. To equal the cloud you can only have forgot your flash drive or needed something on one PC while you were on another for two days in the last eight years. Even if you can claim that, which is doubtful, I would still give the cloud the edge given the nuance of needing to carry everything around with you instead of just needed internet access.

While cloud storage may win out over personal, you are not forced to chose between the two. The article rightly concludes that a hybrid approach is better. Just as your hard drive could crash, the cloud could go dark. It is prudent to be using both to get the most robust protection for your data as possible. That is why I use Dropbox (my review) (Max Free Space). It is a service that lets you keep your files current both on your PC, in the cloud, and on other devices of your choosing seamlessly. If your PC crashes, the data is in the cloud. If you are on a different PC, you can pull it from the cloud. If the cloud goes down, your files are on your PC. If the cloud goes dark at the same time all of your devices crash, something tells me you will have more important things on your mind then pulling up a doc file; like the global cataclysm that has just struck.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/googles-blogger-outage-makes-the-case-against-a-cloud-only-strategy/3300 (via)

"Earlier this week, Google rolled out a maintenance release for its Blogger service. Something went terribly wrong, and its Blogger customers have been locked out of their accounts for more than a day. Google’s engineers have been frantically working to restore service ever since, although they haven’t shared any details about the problem.
...
That’s nearly 48 hours of downtime, and counting. Overnight updates promise “We’re making progress” and “We expect everything to be back to normal soon.”
...
Google has owned and operated Blogger since 2003. It’s not like they’re still trying to figure out how to integrate the service into their operation. If it can happen at Blogger, why can’t it happen with another Google service?
"

2 comments:

  1. While I don't disagree with your post overall, this part is inaccurate: the worst group hit suffered about a day of not being able to update, and maybe two days before lost posts were restored.

    I lost 8 posts from May 11 and 12 and they HAVE NOT been restored yet. I'd be willing to bet they never will. I'm not the only one, either. Read the Blogger Help Forum for many more in the same boat: Something is Broken.

    It is still a major mess for many, many Blogger bloggers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. @N.S. Jakson - Sorry to hear about your missing posts. Still; eight missing posts assuming you never get them back (representing two days) over eight years is still better then most people's offline track record.

    It was, and apparently still is for some, a mess, but the problem should not be overstated. Talk of abandoning the cloud over this is ridiculous. Using it as an example to show that important data is best backed up in multiple places is appropriate.

    ReplyDelete

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