FIXZR

Laptops are displacing desktops. Laptop diskdrives are small, and potentially getting smaller*. Increasingly this means that the disk inside your main machine is insufficient to house all your precious data.  You can plug in an external harddrive, but the reason it isn’t in the laptop in the first place, is the same reason you won’t want to carry it around everywhere. Netbooks, and maybe soon tablets, are also displacing laptops, and they have even less storage. Importantly they probably are a second or third device, within a set of devices all insufficent to master all of your data. This leaves people with stranded islands of data, and for many, external hardrives acting as overflow master storage (rather than back-up like it was supposed to be). For storage at least, the role of master is becoming difficult to place. But that’s not the only problem. With all of my devices now portable (and therefore highly stealable and loseable) I need a computing model that can easily cope with any one device being absent. The present model requires one of my devices to co-ordinate syncing and backup, with some devices (like the iPhone) being tied to others (in the case of the iPhone to my laptop). This has the effect of making one of my devices essentially the master, as all others must operate, at least partitially, through it. This master needs to be used regularly (if it is to perform its task well), and be kept secure - too criteria which are increasing at odds with each other. I find I can go a week without using my laptop, leaving me at risk of one weeks digital work/life being lost between backups. So, I believe we need two things:

1) A form of central storage that my multiple devices can access

2) A backup/replication scheme that doesn’t depend on any one device to operate it

The answer to this would appear to be cloud storage. However, there are cost and performance issues which I believe will exist for quite some time to come. Currently, getting 300GB of online storage from Apple would cost $750 a year ($50 per 20GB), a price I’m not willingly to pay. Cloud storage is also much slower to access that your local SCSI/IDE drive. The cloud may be the answer for mission critical back-ups (like contacts, low-res photo copies, email) but it won’t be storing my 4 hours of safari videos anytime soon. The solution I need is a central (cloud) based service that co-ordinates my local resources. I want to tell a service that I have 4 devices, 1 NAS, and 2 external drives and let it coordinate the (wireless) repication of data across my devices. I want backups, local caches, and true synchronization of versions, all coordinated without needing to plugin to, or depend upon, a single device.

Maybe I’m being too short-sighted, and the cloud will provide all sooner than I think. I note with interest that Google now requests local storage access rights on my iPhone. The recognition of local storage, and its many advantages, I believe is key, and the sooner someone starts to manage it centrally for me, the better!

* A move to SSD (Solid State Drives) will decrease storage capacity in the short to medium term given the increased cost of this medium. SSD’s are being adopted to improve battery life and  performance.