The Dark Side Of "The Cloud"

As we all move to Web 2.0 services we should remember that their can be a dark side to having our 'stuff' in "The Cloud."  This blog is a good example.  Originally hosted (paid) with Weblogger/Manila starting in 2001.  Then a few months ago (not sure exactly when) the blog went away.  New owners I guess.  Sent out emails, found it had been moved to WordPress, was asked to pay $99/year for hosting.

At this point we got into a dispute, I'm not saying I was 100% right and they were 100% wrong ... but at a particular point I made it clear that given WordPress was offering free hosting I was reluctant to pay for hosting on WordPress.  As it turns out they may have been using WordPress on their own servers, I'm not sure.

Well at that point they simply switched off the blog.  And there was nothing I could do ...

Except for the fact that sometime in the past I had saved a off-line copy of this blog.

So here we are, on TypePad with most of the blog restored, even with the dates of the articles intact.

So my point is that "The Cloud" does have a dark side.  What happens to your 'stuff' in a business negotiation?  Hopefully it doesn't just get switched off.

Comments

[bikingbill]

In this case, my log-in to the blog had been disabled for some time.

I have been trying to export a blog from blogger.com for use here in TypePad with no joy so far.

The main point is you want off-line copies of "your stuff."

[Matthew G. Saroff]

Well, what I do is that I save each month as a word document in blogger.

Word does that just fine for me, since if I intend to reuse the text, it will be in a Word doc.

You can also use "blogger in draft" (http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=97416&ctx=sibling ) to backup blogger as an Atom feed.

[bikingbill]

P.S. I did offer to pay 50% of the fee to have a export of the blog at one point. Oh well.