Make Sure You Can Get Your Data

Source: San Diego International Airport

I've written about this topic before, but a question I was asked this morning made me think that it's time to bring it up again. 

This morning, after my presentation at Hunter College, CUNY, I was asked a question about the reliability storing information in "the cloud." It's not an uncommon question and it is a valid concern. My recommendation is, if you're going to store a lot important information in a cloud-based service, make sure that you can export your information whenever you want. If that is not an option, I would be reluctant to store a lot of important information like grades or exams in that service.

I do 98% of my document creation in Google Docs. Any document that I create in Google Docs that is important to me I download a copy of and store on my computer and or on removable drives. On the other hand, I have plenty of short documents in Google Docs that I never download because they don't contain any information that I couldn't live without.