Many people say that the next big thing is cloud computing and that we will all be using it sooner or later, if not already. The term 'cloud computing' means the internet and in some ways it is a return to the old days where large computers in a company held data and software and everyone accessed it through cheap dumb terminals.
It's slightly different now because the internet has made large computing centres open to the general public and not just selected employees in a company. There are many online storage services that offer to store your files, webmail for email, photo sharing and video sharing, online applications like word processors and spreadsheets, and so on.
We are increasingly being tempted by offers to look after our files and cool online applications, but these are early days in cloud computing and not all services that are around now will be around next year or the year after. The problem is that running these online cloud computing services is expensive and it's hard to make a profit. You can only carry on making a loss for so long.
Xdrive, an online storage company that you can use to store files, has recently announced that it is to close. It is not the first to close and it won't be the last. When you use one of these services to store files, for email, photos, or whatever, and they close, it can be very frustrating. How are you going to get all your files/photos/email off the service? Can you transfer them to another service? What if you didn't see the closure notice and everything was deleted? It's enough to put you off cloud computing.
At the moment it is not recommended to store your files/email/photos or whatever online without an offline backup just in case the service closes or has a serious fault and loses your data. If you don't want to do this, at least use two different companies so that if one shuts down you will still have your files/photos/email at the another.
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