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Sunday, February 20, 2011

2000 Movies

I think I've finally convinced my uncle to hover in the cloud. Just a few weeks ago he was very unwilling and saw absolutely no need for the cloud and such fancy services. However, his collection of 2000 movies may have helped change his mind.


A few weeks ago, he bought a new 8 TB drive and he was telling me that he will put his collection of 2000 movies on to it. I suggested the cloud, but he wasn't interested. He said he'd get me a 1 TB portable drive and get me some of his collection. Since then, I've been anxiously waiting for him to come visit. Yesterday I caught him on SkyPE, and I happened to ask him about that collection (and my copy!). The lost collection. Demolished by a hard disk failure. The HD was a new Western Digital 8 TB RAID. Yes RAID, Redundant Array of Independent Disks. You know, the type that is 'anti-fail'. Well they failed and he has no backup and WD does not take any responsibility for data loss, but they were kind enough to recommend a data recovery service. The data recovery service they recommended does not guarantee anything except that it would cost him a less than $8,000 to recover whatever they can find, if anything.

Near the end of our chat about this topic he said "I wish there was a service where we can store all this stuff and have it available for easy access". "The cloud!", I said, and I think he is finally convinced.

To recap, I'm happy to save another soul, but I am angry that I lost my, yes MY copy of 2000 movies. I know it's not as bad as losing your cancer research http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20028475-1.html, but it's still a loss for humans to the machines.

Next time, I will talk about my recent cloud development experience using Amazon Web Services.

Stay tuned...