[crossi]

I was reading an article that was talking about Amazon's Cloud Drive. They were noting a progression in amount you can access and convenience from the first tape Walkmans, to portable CD players, to ipods and finally cloud drive storage. Amazon is certainly pushing that by first removing the SD slot from their Kindles, then decreasing the amount of memory in their kindles by more than half. It's like they are trying to force you to use the Cloud.

The Cloud may all be very well but they never mentioned a number of disadvantages. One is privacy, you can never be sure that what is in cloud storage or being delivered is as secure as physical media in your control. Second is you can't access it everywhere. Not just out in the wild but some work places and on some planes you are not allowed internet access. Physical media you can take anywhere. Third is expense. The amount of free storage is limited. Eventually you will pass that limit then to access your files you will need to pay a monthly fee. None of the monthly fees one pays for various services are very high but they quickly add up to a considerable sum so I try to severly limit anything with a monthly charge.

You might be able to tell that I am not a cloud fan. I never even turn on whispernet on my Kindle and I still use a landline not cellphone.

I do use Dropbox for backing up my documents, but I also have backups on a harddrive and often on paper. Just in case.