Reliable storage in the cloud….

It seems like today there has been a spate of news about reliability of storing data in the cloud.

First there is some news about online backup provider Carbonite losing some customer data (the customers themselves were probably able to backup everything again and possibly didn’t lose any data).

Then there is some news that JungleDisk customers were having issues reaching their files on Amazon S3.

Finally there was some discussion on Hacker News on whether you can trust backing up to Amazon’s S3 or Mosso’s cloud storage offering.

The truth of the matter is that reliable storage is hard — even companies like Amazon and Mosso will have downtime or equipment breakdown that with all the fail-safes and backups and backups-of-backups, you as a customer can lose files. Cloud storage must be viewed as a cheap high-capacity disk where you store large amounts of data and you should be prepared for data loss. You as a consumer should take care to make additional backups of all your data — just like investing in the stock market, you should spread your risk. Unlike the stock market though — you need to spread all your data across multiple backup targets.