A catastrophe waiting to happen.

Apple duly rolled out its bunch of cloud-centric offerings this past Monday to the usual stomach churning hype. It was one of the worst presentations I have seen from the fruit company, unfocused and confusing. None of this aided by a CEO who is clearly (and tragically) on his last legs. Steve Jobs looked awful, his voice was hoarse and he had difficulty with movement and memory. Far worse than before. Sad. But none of that resulted in moderation of Apple’s ridiculous hype. That trait is truly embedded in the corporate culture at One Infinite Loop.

Amongst the ridiculous claims of ‘new features’ were things like Autosave and Versioning which saves your work as you type. “Brand new”, “Apple only”, etc. Of course, this only works with Apple’s apps – sorry, but I know of no working finance professional who uses Numbers in preference to Excel (which has an Autosave feature in any case) or prefers Pages to Word, awful as the latter may be. It’s called ‘industry default’. These users, myself included, will not be migrating to Apple’s products just because of Autosave. Lightroom has been saving on the fly since Version 1 years ago on Macs and PCs, and allows you to step back through versions. Even the wretched Intuit Corporation has had on-the-fly saving in Quicken for well over a decade. And that’s in a PPC app!

But the hype meter was really cranked up for iCloud, Apple’s desperate attempt to catch up with Google’s Android and related offerings. Before writing more, let me just relate a little personal chronology.

• iDisk at MobileMe went down and files stored there were inaccessible. Mercifully I had local copies.
• MobileMe went down and I could not receive or send email.
• This site went down owing to server problems at BlueHost, the hosting service I use.
• Snap!, my daily Photoblog, went down – same hosting service, same issue. Twice.
• There was a power cut and all computers here went down for the 30 minute duration. (I do not have battery back-up).

Time frame? How about all happened during the past seven days? And this is in a big city environment with relatively stable infrastructure, not Tornado Alley, though we do get the occasional earthquake here in California.

Now let me illustrate how AT&T pipes its broadband into the home here. This is typical not unusual in America where doing everything at the lowest cost is the prime dictate. Homes here are separated by easements which act as locations for utility poles – power, telephone, broadband. Here’s the utility pole whence broadband enters the home – even the US Congress could not have made this mess:

Thereafter, the precious length of copper cable conveying broadband goes through a couple of junction boxes, a few more twists and turn, then enters the home through this high tech orifice, also known as a hole in the wall:

And you expect me to trust my data to the cloud? No matter that it will likely be hacked by a fourteen year old from the Ukraine next week, how do I get at it when one of the many variables between the remote file server and my desktop goes down?

Want more hype? Apple will replicate your music catalog at its data center giving you download access on many devices to your catalog wherever you have a broadband connection. Something Amazon has been doing with Kindle for years now. They keep one copy of each book, as does Apple of each tune, and a list of what belongs to whom. It’s hardly magic. You have long been able to access your Kindle catalog from any device. Delete it to make space and you are still the owner should you eventually decide to re-download it later. The biggest advantage of Apple’s approach to music storage is the effective amnesty for thieves. Those who have stolen music on their computers now get an iCloud version for $25 a year – presumably a chunk of that goes to the record companies. But for serious music lovers this approach does little. First, fully 50% of my iTunes music catalog is missing cover art as iTunes cannot recognize the music (no, it’s not Lady Gagger). So this feature adds little and means I will instead have to upload my unrecognized files to iCloud to make them available on multiple devices. Now my files are all in uncompressed form ripped from my original CDs, as my ears cannot stand compressed music, so now I’m looking at the prospect of uploading hundreds of multi-megabyte files to the cloud. Remember how long that took with CrashPlan? I think I’ll pass – it’s faster to move them locally, and much more secure.

But there is one positive to all this iCloud hype. MobileMe will be killed some fifteen months hence, replaced with a free account with up to 5gB storage in iCloud. It will provide email, iCal, Safari bookmarks and so on synchronized across multiple devices, just like MobileMe does. Sometimes. And you will even be able to get a partial refund of what you just paid for MobileMe using this. I have no idea how competent or reliable iCloud will be, but it could not possibly be worse than MobileMe.

I believe the next global financial meltdown will result from over-dependence on cloud storage (unless the villains on Wall Street get there first, again), with some simple human error or hostile act rendering much of the civilized world without internet access. No web purchases, no bank access, no credit card transactions, no national defense, no medical records, you name it. Our enemies no longer need nukes. A pair of cable cutters will do. Alternatively, if it can go wrong it will. There’s no reason for you to lose your photographs in the process. Store them locally and back up, on-site and off-site, often. Who would you rather trust with your data – you or a cloud vendor about whose technology and procedures you know precisely zero?

What happens when you trust the cloud. G1, kit lens.

And now, the cartoon of the year:

Don’t adopt the Cupertino plan.

There are probably some sheepherders in remote areas of Uzbekistan who do not know that Apple’s new mega data center resides in the equally culturally arid desert of North Carolina. It will open to the usual hype and exaggeration next Monday. But, for the rest of us, that message has been broadcast loudly from the rooftops of Cupertino and points west for well over a year now.

First, let’s revisit what a robust, secure, distributed back-up plan looks like.

We start with the Pindelski Plan:

The Pindelski Plan. Two back-ups in the office – full and sequential. One in the car.
One somewhere else at an undisclosed location.

Now the Cupertino Plan:

Apple’s idea of multiple back-up sites.

So when Mobile Me(ss) next goes down, you will know why.

Do you feel lucky?

And in case you want confirmation of this easy target, here it is in Google Earth:

Yes, it will store a list of all your replaceable movies and tunes. But it’s probably the worst possible idea for backing up your precious photographs.

Wait a minute, you say. They will simply use the existing MobileMe (on the Hayward fault?) to back-up data. Uh huh. And you last used MobileMe when, exactly?

Finally uploaded.

After two weeks of uploading, some 170gB – comprising my user settings and Lightroom catalog – have been uploaded to CrashPlan’s servers. I first wrote about this cloud storage service here.

100%! Two weeks of uploading ….

Hereafter, uploads will be limited to incremental changes as new photos are added to Lightroom.

So how well does recovery work? Click on the ‘Restore’ icon and this is what you see (CrashPlan uses East coast time):

Note that you can recover at any date – just like in Apple’s Time Machine.

The first, unnamed, dropdown is the User’s directory, which CrashPlan uploads by default. The second, ‘HackPro HD’ contains only those directories elected when the upload commenced. In my case, that means my Lightroom catalog:

Drill down and you get to the catalog of Pictures:

One more step and you see the actual RAW, TIF or JPG files:

Check the files to recover and you see this:

I clicked on ‘Click here to download your restored files’ and the 12.5mB RAW file was deposited on the HackPro’s Desktop in 24 seconds, using my 10 mb/s broadband connection. That’s 0.52 mBytes/second compared to the theoretical maximum of 1.25 mB/s (10 megabits equal 1.25 megabytes and the line is 10 megabits/second). Not bad. The Desktop is a good destination as there’s no risk of overwriting your Lightroom catalog.

A couple of clicks and the file is in Photoshop, ready for processing:

File restored from CrashPlan’s cloud server. G1, kit lens @ 30mm, 1/320, f/5.6, ISO 100.

You can also restore the sidecar file with all the processing data, to avoid having to reprocess the picture.

Restored Zip files remain separately available for 24 hrs – the original RAW (or whatever) file remains untouched:

The only anomaly encountered so far is the wildly erratic reporting of upload status. I asked for daily email updates and got them at inconsistent times. That’s troubling, as inconsistency is the last thing I want from a cloud backup service, but the files appear properly uploaded and easily restored:

Erratic reporting from CrashPlan.

A check of files in my HackPro Lightroom and the CrashPlan directories confirms a like file count.

So, for $50 a year with currently unlimited data volumes, CrashPlan looks to be a useful supplementary backup plan. Just don’t make it your primary one. Are you about to trust all your pictures solely to a fragile ‘cloud’, where you have no independent verification of the adequacy of procedures or the financial solvency of the business?

Finally, recalling my earlier mantra that the only valid backup plan is one which has the qualities of paranoia and mistrust at its core, I made a reminder in iCal to prompt me to do a test restore of a file monthly. That way I get some comfort that the cloud database is not corrupted. It takes seconds to do.

Update June 13, 2011:

With incremental upgrades to my Lightroom catalog on the HackPro work machine being conferred faultlessly, and automatically, in the CrashPlan cloud storage database, I have signed up for 3 years for a total of $119.99:

In Part V I look at backing up additional files and at how best to backup applications.

Alternatives.

Cloud backups are not for everyone and, as I explained earlier, should never be your first line of defense against loss of your photographs. No one foresaw Fukushima happening. The power supplies ended up below the water line, useless. If it can go wrong it will and one of the great disasters to befall the world in the twenty-first century will likely be a massive failure of the ‘cloud’ through human error or enemy action.

What prompts this thought is an email from a friend of the blog who points out the futility of adopting CrashPlan for his very large photo library. A picture being worth a few words, here is his problem:

A reader’s problem.

I am a patient man but, even so, waiting for the best part of a year for your initial upload to complete is unrealistic. While CrashPlan does offer to provide you with a ‘seed drive’ by mail where you copy your pictures and which you mail back to them, this particular reader is in the UK where no such service exists. Eventually, this reader decided to upload smaller JPGs and not RAW files, so he will have a credible recovery source, albeit not of the highest quality afforded by RAW originals.

So here are some ideas, in addition to the JPG one, where your upload broadband speeed is slow and your picture catalog large:

• Identify the best pictures and upload first. In Lightroom the ‘star rating’ system makes it easy to create a separate catalog with just the highest rated pictures.
• Use the CrashPlan software to populate a friend’s computer if you can get comfortable with all the issues of trust, integrity and competence this approach raises.
• Adopt my CarBak approach, meaning offsite storage, and encrypt the data in case of theft.
• Don’t waste time backing up applications, movies (unless they are home movies) and music. You can always buy those again. And with Apple shortly migrating to cloud storage of all your movies and tunes, recovery will be easy as long as no one rains on their cloud. The problem with Apple’s cloud storage, unlike with CrashPlan’s, is that everyone knows where it is in North Carolina, open to attack. CrashPlan wisely keeps mum on the location(s) of its drive farms.

Getting there.

Details of CrashPlan, a cloud storage backup system, appear here.

After 5 days of chugging away, CrashPlan now reports as follows:

So at this rate I expect all 170gB of my pictures/data will be in the cloud in ten days’ time. Thereafter the rate of adding new snaps will be much lower, of course. That’s still within the 30 day free trial which should give me time to test incremental uploads as pictures are added and also to test the Restore function. It’s not 143,000+ pictures, BTW. Most of that count is system files in my User directory which CP uploads by default.

If all is well I will likely sign up for 12 months for $50.

I will report back in Part III.