As someone who is a frequent visitor to the Amazon website, I have naturally enough been inundated with offers for their free cloud service. Up until now I’ve pretty much ignored them, but since I have been thinking about the new Kindle Fire I decided it was time to try Amazon’s cloud. After all, one of the selling points of the new tablet is its ability to work so closely with the cloud.
Of course, cloud computing in various forms has been pretty wide-spread for quite a while now. Those who have a fast, dependable internet connection can choose to have the vast servers at various companies take care of storing all kinds of files and 
even programs. Then you can access your stuff on your desktop computer, smart phone, netbook, tablet, whatever.
Most of us have been using at least one type of cloud computing for years now. Even though it wasn’t called that at first, web-based email services like Gmail, Hotmail, etc, would certainly qualify as cloud computing. And of course those of us who are bloggers work with a lot of content and programming that is hosted elsewhere. I even use a form of cloud service from time to time when I run out of room on my normal site and use a free file service to temporarily store a music sample. (Like the one below.)
So anyhow, I’ve sent several hundred of my favorite music files from my hard drive to my Amazon cloud and so far it has worked pretty well. I keep the Amazon Cloud Player on a tab of my Firefox browser so that I can listen to the music any time and I don’t really have any complaints. The only thing that worries me about all this is what happens if we all get too dependent on this cloud thing, and our internet access gets interrupted?
Cannonball Adderley – “Clouds”
Geezer Music Club 
Your last sentence sums up my attitude to cloud storage.
As I worked in I.T. for more than 40 years I don’t trust it one little bit, I know what can go wrong. I don’t suggest maliciousness but even my programs fell over now and then (what? No, surely not? Yes, I’m afraid so). I have two external disks (2Tb and 1.5Tb) upon which I back up from my hard drives. So my music (and other things) are in three separate places (besides the original CDs of course).
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Sounds like you have it covered every which way, Peter.
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The ‘cloud’ is only the electronic analogy of the ‘big government’ model, and Jefferson’s statement about big government is equally applicable, altho’ maybe in a bit different sense, to ‘cloud computing’ … ‘A cloud big enough to store everything you have is big enough to lose everything you’ve got.’ I don’t store anything in the ‘cloud’, and use the same model Peter describes – everything goes to external HD storage, and it’s all FireWire 800 – but that’s just ‘cuz I don’t have ‘Thunderbolt’ yet …
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I love your quote:
‘A cloud big enough to store everything you have is big enough to lose everything you’ve got.’
So far I’ve only copied a small portion of my musical library to the cloud, and it’s all backed up a couple of ways anyhow. The funny thing is that I’m probably most vulnerable to losing what you’re reading — the good ol’ GMC. I’ve been doing this thing for over 5 years and have written almost a thousand posts, and it could all disappear any time. (The host – WordPress – does give bloggers the ability to save the written part peridically, but I’ll confess that I’m not too diligent about doing so.)
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