The End of Personal Home Storage
I predict that personal home storage is going to all but fade away in the next few years. There just won’t be any need for it. Those who still insist on buying portable hard drives and encased gigs to throw next to their machines will be looked at by the young’ns the same way we look at our grandparents who stuff their money into mattresses for fear of trusting the bank.
I understand and respect the risk that many see that comes with trusting all of their data online. But the risk of losing data is going to be faced anyway, whether it’s in your home office or in a server camp in California. In both cases there’s risk, but that doesn’t mean the same pros/cons come with each. For example, with a hosted storage solution you don’t have to worry about
- managing your own space, including environment control and troubleshooting,
- paying the bills to keep it running all the time, or
- worrying that your house will burn down and take your data with it.
Although before storing online you should be concerned with
- securing your information (much like Grandma’s cash in her mattress),
- copyright regulations and user agreement forms, and
- playing nice with Customer Service Reps. Who enjoys that?
So there are some ups and downs to each side. But imagine what the geek world will look like let alone the rest of the world. For one thing you may (sooner than later) be considered a dinosaur for purchasing extra hard drives. I’ve already given a few photographers a weird look when they don’t know about Flickr (before evangelizing them, of course).
Flickr’s a good case study, actually. This is a service that will host your photos, make them manageable and shareable, and do it a hell of a lot better than your computer can. But if RAW is your thing, well, you aren’t storing them on Flickr. So the purist would say “There, you need personal storage for that.” Well, besides the fact that I think the purist would miss the point of the case study, I do agree that internet based storage services have a way to go. But Flickr is nipping at the possibilities; this combined with Google Apps, numerous writing applications, and now presentation services available online, one can’t help but wonder what the use will be for desktop storage (let alone desktop applications) in the time to come.
Imagine all of your data being accessible from anywhere. And it’s easier than navigating your computer’s hard drive. And it can be shared and collaborated on by anyone you choose. And backups are limitless. And it’s free.
The direction the internet is headed, as far as I can tell, is to make the desktop a portal. One of the first things to go has been applications (I can’t remember the last time I used Word if I didn’t need to) and storage is not too far down the list. In some ways, this is an exciting shift that’s happening. In other ways, it may only be the changing of hands (from the big shots now to the little shots who are going to be big shots later). Only time will tell.
I don’t necessarily agree that home/personal storage will disappear at all.
Those of us in areas prone to natural disaster or service interruptions (like myself in South Florida, hurricanes, bad storms, idiot construction workers cutting lines, etc), people simply can’t afford to be cut off from their media and files if there is an issue with connectivity.
Flickr has only gone down a handful of times, and each of those outages have been very abbreviated, but consider if you will, large server farms and interruptions (a good number of services went down recently in California, including many blogging services and Technorati).
People use personal or home storage for two main reasons: fast, immediate access without an internet connection, and higher quality than most online storage services can allow.
I think personal/home storage will become reduced in the near future, but I don’t think it will ever go away.
First thing’s first: vendors need to come up with methods to increase transmission quality without requiring consumers have and pay for the latest in internet connectivity.
By fullman on August 7, 2007 2:43 pm
I think there will always be need for offline storage, for company and for personal use.
First is legal exposure. Online storage will always be readily accessible to law enforcement, and any agency can be corrupted at any level. Look at the spying charges against the FBI and their unwarranted security letters, and the Patriot Act trouncing of due process still in the courts. Not to mention individual sellers of secrets and other human failures.
And that doesn’t even come close to what foreign governments may claim or attempt in the future. Since the Internet connects to their country, they make claim access to everything online — to make criminal charges across borders, to leverage graft and corruption, whatever. Watch the scandals and corruption of the UN. United Nations? United in Graft. What age subject is ‘child porn’ in *your* country, what kind of depiction violates *your* laws? What trade secrets are worth stealing or compromising?
Anything that law enforcement can require online hosts to provide creates a window of opportunity for hackers and foreign hostile agents to steal, destroy, or corrupt data. We may see more domestic industrial and military espionage as well. The more data online, the more targets for hostiles to attack.
And there will be private activities. Applications to operate offline devices, perform offline tasks, where connectivity is seldom of use. Application development, novel creation. Music libraries - Who wants to upload all 1200 of the tunes off their CD’s, then have the RIAA decide that is publishing, demand a $500/month fee and 12 cents a song every month?
Oh, I see where you are going. The personal storage market will start drying up, and the cost of devices will climb as market volume drops. Sort of like the artificial way the oil companies always seem to raise gas prices for Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Grr.
By Brad K. on August 7, 2007 5:49 pm
I think we will move our storage offsite, if we ever get decent, ubiquitous broadband speeds (WiMAX?) and implementations. I tried putting my music for iTunes offsite on a server using MacFUSE mounts, and it was just far too painfully slow.
There are privacy issues, but for media, for the most part, there really aren’t too many. I could care less honestly if someone goes around copying my music collection or peeking at my uploaded video collection, because if there was anything private, I would keep it locally.
By akatsuki on August 8, 2007 11:40 am