Kodak giving cloud computing a bad name?

This week saw a panic caused by cloud computing a panic that has now left me very uneasy about storing my files photos and documents on third party servers or on cloud servers.

In 2007 it became apparent that storing large amount of photos locally on my desk top was not making sense , why should you take up valuable memory on a computer for photos that you hardly ever access? It made sense to store them either locally with a special hard drive or on a third party server. I went for the latter and selected Kodak one of the best known names in photography to look after my photos. Storing precious photos of family moments celebrations and special holidays could in my mind be only entrusted to a big brand name. There was no way I would take a chance on some small operation that could lose my files or close down unexpectedly.

Cost was also an issue and Kodak Share offered a free service to store all my photos and made it easy for me to share them to my contacts.

Then this week i received an email that had some unbelievable news, in fact i checked to see if this was some sort of phishing scam email as the content was simply not possible. Kodak were telling me to download all my photos ASAP or they were going to delete them. The company Kodak had gone bust and this part of their service was no longer available.

The battle to download over 3000 photos began and I made the decision NOT to use another photo storing service again. If Kodak can go under so can most of the guys storing your files and I no longer wanted that risk. It seems that the global financial crisis has made any company vulnerable to closure. How do you select the best company to store your files? size and brand are now no longer guarantees for safety

“My warning is that you should be aware of who you trust your files with and maybe cloud computing is not all its said to be”

Letter from Kodak

As you may be aware, earlier this year, Eastman Kodak filed for U.S. bankruptcy court protection in order to restructure the company for future growth. As part of that restructuring, we recently announced that we would cease operations of our Kodak Gallery US and Kodak Gallery Canada businesses on July 2, 2012, as a result of a sale of those assets. Sadly, today, we must also announce that in order to best enable future Kodak success, we will be ceasing all other remaining Kodak Gallery business worldwide as well, also effective July 2, 2012, 9pm CET/ 7pm GMT.

Due to Kodak Gallery’s closing on July 2, 2012 it is urgent that you take the following actions to protect your photos and projects. Please take a moment to:

Download your Kodakgallery.co.uk photos or they will be lost
After July 2, 2012, 9pm CET/ 7pm GMT, your current account on Kodakgallery.co.uk will be closed and any items in your shopping cart or projects in your account will be permanently deleted. You may continue to download your photos until July 23, 2012, 9pm CET/ 7pm GMT, but after that time, all remaining photos in your account will be deleted.

Free Cloud Computing

Google Drive is a file storage and sync service by Google that was released on April 24, 2012 and the service much like Kodak is promoted as free . Yes free! Google Drive gives the user a free-of-charge cloud storage of 5 gigabytes .

I am not fooled we all know they are going to introduce charges once they have you hooked, what are your thoughts?

^{Author Nick Marr}