WHY I H A T E T HE C L O U D

ONCE, MY HOUSE CAUGHT FIRE.

We were safe, but after the embers stopped hissing, my backup hard drives were soaked and crushed by debris. The toughest loss: many years of photos of my children.

I should have put them in the Cloud, yes? The Cloud was supposed to make external backups obsolete. But here’s the catch: using Cloud storage requires trust. Trust that no unauthorised weirdo will gain access to your files. Trust that the company storing your files won’t accidentally delete them. And trust that, when you want to delete some piece of data, it will actually be erased forever. I just can’t do that.

Privacy issues aside, the Cloud quickly becomes like a self-storage unit for your household junk. After a couple of years, you can’t remember what you put in it, but you just leave it there and keep paying for the space. I wish Cloud companies could organise and safely remove duplicate files. I’ve tried Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Dropbox, Google Drive – none of them does a decent job of identifying and deleting duplicates. And why should they? If you have ten copies of the same photo of your kid blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, that’s more money for them. Their interest is in renting you as much data space as you’ll pay for. Amazon Web Services is projected to make $10 billion (nearly R140 billion) this year. Storing your virtual stuff is serious business.

And then there’s longevity. Maddeningly, whole services have even been discontinued. Picasa folded into Google Photos. Everpix shut down. When Picturelife was bought by Streamnation, terrified users were locked out of their photos for weeks while the new owners moved 200 million photos to new servers.

The Cloud is a useful backup solution. I can’t argue with that. But I’ll always have my doubts. Which means I’ll always have my hard drives. But from now on they’ll be kept in a fireproof box.