Both WordPress.com and Flickr offer free space. There does not seem to be a time limit for the information that we post at those sites. This actually seems to be an advantage over maintaining (and paying for) our own web sites. (Click continue for more on this subject.)
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Flickr, pictures, Google, Gmail, Tabblo, WordPress
There are now many sites on the web that are offering free space for my data. I have several Gmail related sites at Google (Gmail accounts, web sites, calendars etc.), pictures at Tabblo, several free phpBB forums, and so on. If the business plan of the hosting firm is faulty, I know that when the company vanishes so will everything I’ve deposited in their storage systems. But Flickr has been bought by Yahoo!, and Google seems to be a money-making powerhouse. So I am fairly confident about the longevity of these companies.
My office is littered with legacy data files that I can no longer access with current hardware. Somewhere I have audio cassettes with the text for a newspaper column that I wrote on a Tandy 100 circa 1986. That was a great notebook computer. I could type on an excellent keyboard, and the onboard modem allowed me to file my articles electronically. My data storage was managed with an audio cassette recorder.
There is a little filing cabinet that is crammed with Apple II floppy disks. If I bothered to haul out that old Apple II, with its Z-80 card (complete with its own high speed 64K of memory), I know that it would still work. In the late 80s we acquired WordStar to write and typeset a book on that. It never failed.
My dear old Mac Plus eventually died, so all of the carousels of hard-shelled floppies are now unreadable.
Lately I’ve been reading that CDs and DVDs are not archival! Since my Hi8 camcorder died I have not figured out what is best to do with the several shoe boxes of tapes (and valuable family history).
Flickr, Gmail, WordPress.com, Tabblo, and others are offering to allow me to store data with them for free with the implied promise that access will always be possible.
Wow!
My own web sites will be available only as long as I continue to pay rent with the virtual host. Were I to die, they would be gone in a month or so.
But, will my grandchildren (no, I have none… yet) be able to read my blog and see my photos at Flickr?
Since these huge sites are well backed up, it seems that posting at these free sites offers the greatest potential for secure, long term, survival of data. I presume that as the storage technology changes, my old data will simply be moved to new and better storage media.
The implications of this are considerable. Imagine if a substantial percentage of the computer-using population open several free multi-gigabyte Gmail accounts simply to store data from their computers? No wonder Google is building a new facility next to a major power dam.
I suspect that I am not the only person contemplating where this will lead.
nature tells us that depending on a single source is not wise (read “who moved my cheese”.) regardless of what yahoo, google say, once they decide to pull the plug, I would consider my data stored with them gone. therefore I scatter my data widely as possible. it is a fascinating thought though to imagine my future grandchildren reading this post in 30 years. heck I might even try to read this post in 30 years!
@tomawesome,
Good point about spreading your data around. I could imagine a software company that would act as a broker. You would deposit your pictures, files, articles or whatever with the broker and that online company would then store it in your name at several sites. I suppose the broker’s service could be paid with ads at the site.
The magic here is the word free. The advantage of the free site is not that there is no cost, but that there is no further action required by the user after filing the data. The question then is: what is the security and longevity of the data?
It makes me wonder how much disk space is now being wasted by sites that have free accounts that were set up and then ignored. I know that bravenet eventually deny access to such accounts. Will Flickr and Google do the same thing? I have a couple of forums at freebb.com that I visit every few weeks to keep them active until I am ready to use them again. And I have 2 unused WordPress.com accounts because I wanted to secure the names for future use.
Just as a bank will diminish an unused bank account, and eventually turn the funds over to the government, surely there will be some concern about continuing to store and backup un-accessed data.
Wow! The inverse function of privacy is durability! How do you optimise the benefit of these functions?
I suspect that attempting to achieve real privacy, or durability, is impossible. If I had to choose, I think that durability may be of more value to me.
My values are somewhat different from those of the mainstream culture. As a result of the Internet and other forms of personal networking, I am finding a large community, or communities, that share different sets of my values.
I don’t think that those of us who demand privacy would be able to find each other.
Did you see my article on networking?
http://howesound.wordpress.com/2006/12/27/blogging-seems-to-be-a-form-of-internet-viral-networking/
I value the people in my various networks. It is worth abandoning some privacy for us to be able to find each other.
In 1999, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems said to a group of reporters, “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it.” The story in WIRED is here: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,17538,00.html
For a project that is not related to this blog, I considered the possibility of, what I called, “legacy blogging.” This would be a blog that recalls past history — in this case, of a beloved organization.
The concept would be to blog about the past as if the entries were made at the time. It could create an interesting history for people to search, read and explore. I tried it out and asked about the limits of what is possible with the folks at WordPress.com. You can read about it in the article: An Experiment in Time Travel.
This comment is part of that experiment. The concept worked, but the legacy article did not show up in Google. I am wondering if this comment, clearly posted in November 2007, will cause Googlebot to catalog the article dated 1988.