Tuesday, May 17, 2011

The Cloud Ate My Homework

Just in case anyone noticed a post about Source Code (the movie) here a few days ago, and is wondering what happened to it - evidently Google/Blogger had a little problem late last week, which meant that they had to roll everything on Blogger back a couple of days, then restore stuff one thing at a time.

Oh well, stuff happens.

Then they announced that they'd got just about everything restored by the end of Saturday or thereabouts. Evidently, my last post didn't fit under "just about everything". (Nor, to judge by the support boards, did a fair number of others.) Google are being deeply silent about when the remaining stuff will be restored, if ever. I'm not bothering to reconstruct that post from memory yet, because you never know, they might yet actually deliver on their initial promises.

One criticism of the whole trendy concept of "cloud computing" is that you're trusting your data security to some other party. (Conversely, one thing to be said for it is that it provides inherent off-site backups.) Well, all I've lost, at worst, is an hour or so's opinionated noodling. No big deal. But that loss has reminded me that I need to keep my on-site backups up to date.

(It's also shown me that Google's support people are as prone as any to go into vacuous cut-and-paste arse-covering BS mode when trouble strikes. Big surprise there.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Phil
I use Google Reader as a Blog Aggregator so I don't have to remember to go looking to see if people have updated recently. I've just checked and your "Source Code" post is still available to me there, so if Blogger can't recover it and you want a copy of the original text, let me know...

Anonymous said...

It's in my local cache, too.

(It's funny. Lots of people seem to like gmail and blogger and such like. I've effectively rebuilt the same thing on my own hardware, where I can still use it from anywhere, but where I don't have to trust anything to be done right by anyone else... that said, I am a professional Unix admin and perhaps not your typical Internet user.)

Phil Masters said...

If either or both of you could send me a copy, I'd be very grateful, as despite all their claims, Google don't seem to be fixing this.

Thanks.