You can trust "The Cloud"

The only problem there is the current typical model for data on phones is you get ~22GB of high speed a month, then it either degrades to

That's why I'm still using my old Crackberry

TracFone here has always been Verizon afaik. AT&T got a late start in the local wireless business. When I got my first TracFone only the CDMA models were available for this zipcode. It never made a difference to me but the early iPhones, up to gen 4 I think, were GSM/AT&T only so they were out.

The TracFone site did show some 4G flips for about $20. I'll get around to it one of these days. It's not like I have MBs of contact info to transfer.

Not the phone, but I take the Verizon MiFi with me when I travel. I don't think I've hit anyplace where it didn't connect including out in the middle of the BLM sagebrush. Half the time the motel wifi is so crappy I use it instead.

Not to put a fine point on it, 5G E is AT&T marketing bullshit for 'we're tuning our 4G infrastructure'.

Those users that have stuck their hand in the fire usually listen when I tell them things. Well, except for the ones who blame me for it.

You know, I write all these viruses so I can charge the hell out of them to remove them. Uh huh... Like the bad guys need my help. Yup. Somehow I ruined their hard drive too.

You never could bullshit your way out of a wet paper bag.

iphones encrypt the nav data that leaves the phone so that even snooping on the data doesn’t expose that personal data. And the apps are sandboxed so that they cant see anything but their own data unless you give permission for that so rogue apps cant steal your data.

And the phones are so secure that the FBI had to try to force apple to provide access and apple refused to do that.

Yes, it's not using 5G standards.

The first I heard of 5G it would be needed for communications between self-driving cars.

It should have been near the end of 2016.

I'm on Verizon, and need to get a new phone this year.

Sound awesome to work on.

One if the things I did in "other duties as assigned" at IBM was "availability" where we analysed a customer's operation, identified the critical missions and warned them of all the things that could screw them up. Then we proposed a solution or an assortment of solutions based on your risk tolerance. We had all sorts of packages but the mirrored site was the platinum deal.

Nothing is perfect.

I was burned by the IOMega hiss of death in the 1990s.

In 1979 I backed up my first term paper on ASR33 paper tape. So it ended up all upcased. Danny Burstein will remmeber the 8" floppies we backed stuff on using Eddy Gaillard's PDS program to pack them.

I always use multiple media for important stuff. Tho am cluttered by TOO many backups I don't know which matters. Even microform can decay. Spozably gold CDs are good.

As to the CPA, I knew a sweet late CPA who never ther ANYTHING away. He kept renting more and more storage. CLients depended on him to come up with ancient documents. When he died his wife just junked it all.

As to security, here's an anecdote proving they will find it only if it's worth it. In 1975 I got a super8 cammera and I filmed some tanks in Bulgaria. A year later they stopped my uncle's bus and said "Some American was filming our tanks from your bus". It took them a year to go through their surveilance fotos and track down my passport entry. And yet when someone got to my mailbox because my uncle died, Apple would not give me the surveilance video of the fraudulent purchase because the cops said "Don't bother, insurance got it". Dang the insurance, they invaded my mailbox, I want to strangle them.

Another aphorism: dont' expect the computer (esp OCR, other AI apps) to be better than a dumb secretary.

- = - Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus blog: panix.com/~vjp2/ruminatn.htm - = - web: panix.com/~vjp2/vasos.htm facebook.com/vasjpan2 - linkedin.com/in/vasjpan02 - biostrategist.com ---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---

Exactly, but I'd rather be in control of my own personal info and screw up than rely on services and blame them for the screw up. I find relief in knowing where my data is and not being viewed by anyone else instead of wondering if and who is reading it and if it'll ever get hacked or stolen.

The biggest problem with "archival" storage is not the media failing, it is having a machine to read it. I remember in the early 90s IBM and Sony collaborated in the ultimate storage machine that was a disk library system using 12" laser disks and what they were promising is the media was a "100 year" solution. Alas the 12" laser disk readers were gone in 10. The same basic thing is true of the 3363 tape cartridge. It is like a cassette tape on steroids, about 5" wide that holds 200mb. Good luck finding a working 3363 drive or a machine that uses the ISA or MCA controller card. I am sure there are collectors over on comp.sys.IBM.PS2 with some but not any actual companies.

Meanie snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote

Trivial to encrypt it so it cant be hacked or stolen and to use more than one cloud so it can't vanish overnight.

Corse its important to ensure that the multiple clouds arent all at the one physical facility so that they all go at once if say some unspeakable moslem or another McVeigh blows it up etc.

Yah all it took was for some not-so-bright democrat to stick a 1.4M floppy into the Zip drive housing and it would permanently damage the read/write head...and the IoMega Click-of-Death was born.

I think we still have a reader and a couple of RS-6000 boxes but I don't know if any of them will boot.

I may have a QIC-40 reader around here some place as well as Iomega internal and external drives. Maybe. I threw a lot of s*it out along with the floppies. Like one of those forgotten storage units I realized all that carefully backed up data was worthless.

I back up our source tree and whatever I'm working on, and the company does on and off site backups. Almost everything else can be recreated. Personally I have backed up ripped CDs and images, but the photos are really the only thing that couldn't be easily replaced. A lot of the photos are views from mountaintops that I can't even remember which is which.

I keep my C: as small as possible with as little user data on it as possible so I can keep a fresh image in case it craps out. That is your "installed" software that is harder to back up ever since XP and the way Windows manages the programs. (registry etc). The other drives are just data so all you need is a file synchronizer program to manage your backups and it is a simple copy operation.

That REALLY depends on HOW dumb the secretary is. I've known some who were dumb enough that a crashed Commodore 64 would have given them a good run for their money - - - -