Cautionary tale

So Blogger's sitewide outage affected many of us this week, and in my case I not only could not update, but I had a week's worth of posts wiped out--brilliant, incisive, witty posts; if I may so say, the work represented my best writing ever on the blog. And now it's gone--poof--just like that.

OK, it wasn't a week's worth of posts. It was one post. And it wasn't all that brilliant...or even exceptional, really. But it's still gone.

I think we should keep this in mind as we increasingly hear about the future of computing, with online media storage being pushed as a way to keep us from getting actual physical media. Apparently, even keeping files on our hard drives is going to be passe in the near future. In fact, I just got an e-mail from Amazon the other day touting the "cloud" service to store my media.

Well, what happens if the service goes down? What happens to my media then? Not being able to access it when I want to access it is bad enough (and as a Netflix user, I reserve the right to gripe just a little when I sit down to, you know, USE it, and the service is not working, though it will inevitably draw the ire of people who call that attitude "spoiled." Since when is asking to get what you pay for "spoiled"?), but what if that media is destroyed or just goes poof?

Let's keep that in mind, is all I'm saying. As for my missing post...well, you would have loved it. Trust me. Tell you what, think of something you want to read about, and we'll say that's what I wrote about and that you loved it.