Also, keep in mind that these cloud sites are business and business do at times close their doors.  What happens if all of a sudden they shut down? It's happend where your data is basically gone becuase they disconnected from the net.

Your not getting it. These are very useful back up solutions. Paranoia aside, 

Your data is stored on every computer you install Drop box on as well as off site. Off site storage is a good idea, what good is having 6 hard drives all in the same building that blows up or burns down.  

Like I said , If I was not limited by a 3 Gig a month connection I would certainly do "save as" to drop box. 

Here's one way it would be a huge time saver.
 
I record a lot of on location stuff. I take my Laptop. I then have to transfer that to a external drive or USB stick. 
I then have to transfer that to my main DAW. 
Later, I also will often take the mix downs and load them into my office computer which is part of my home stereo for a "Hi Fi" listen. 

I am forever transferring files between computers. 

With Drop Box the files are instantly shared between all you computers via the internet.  

As I work on 3 computers I therefore would always have 3 copies on site as well as 1 off site.. Not to mention extras on data drives too. 

Another example is I synced my wife's smart phone to dropbox and her laptop. All the pictures she takes with her phone automaticly become stored on the laptop ( once it has a connection). She also stores stuff she might need to refer to at a meeting in there and can pull it up on the phone.  This is the way the world works now. 

Cactus (and others) are right - it is not the solution but a solution.  Nothing digital exists unless it is in three places.  I've learned that the hard way.

Privacy is an issue.  If you don't want info floating around on a cloud out there, don't use it.  But do have a storage solution offsite.  Not likely that your place will burn down, and if it does most files will be the least of your problems.  But no sense rubbing salt in the wounds, either.  I keep finished bu dvds at my mother's house 2.2 miles away.  Not far enough away for the wife, but close enough I can change them out every week or so.

@

Unbelievable! You guys crack me up. "The government's going to spy on me". "I like my privacy". LOL!!!!!

Don't any of you get it? Do you have a checking account? A Debit card? Do you use those cards at the supermarket so you can get better deals? The drug store? Do you pay for your gas with your debit card? Any and all of those things are being tracked and recorded by data mining CORPORTATIONS NOT, the government. In fact, the government gets their information from those data mining corporations. As far as homeland security goes, that's a different animal altogether. Again, none of us are that important. The attitude is understandable, be it sad,  considering the individualistic society we've built.

Bottom line? I think these online storage sites are good. Better safe and have all you stuff in case of an disaster than not. Besides, it will all be online within ten years anyway so get used to it.

At my day job, I build data centers as a Network Engineer. The hardware/software/deployment of data in a cloud is far more likely to be "saved" and recovered, should there be a fault. For example, imagine your data stored, not only 2 or 3 drives, but a nice, large array of them in multiple data racks an in multiple data centers with nightly backups. If a drive fails, you lose nothing. If a data center burns down, you lose nothing (except maybe an hour's or day's worth of work--if they aren't a good business). 

Electrical power is provided with full generator backups, and in some cases served from multiple power grids. In case of a power loss, you get no corruption of your data. In fact, it would not surprise me if Cakewalk/Roland uses Cloudfront from Amazon AWS to serve up downloads and other things. Many development forms use GitHub to version their code. They trust the privacy.

So, if you believe that keeping your data private is the only way to go, rest assured, your data is most likely less important to the rest of the world than the business who owns the storage machines where your data is stored and secured with encryption. I value the instance where an artist is very secretive about their music before release, but afterwards, it's all store-able in the cloud. Keeping reeled tape in Iron Mountain's caves is no longer the safest way to keep your data. 

Now, I don't recommend cloud storage for active sessions. Only archived ones, and right now, local storage is still cheaper. I'd just keep three hard drives with a backup of each project with audio. Have two onsite and one off-site. Sync them every week. For one, Cloud storage is relatively slow for DAW work, and two, if you're having connectivity issues at the moment, you're idle. 

stuhldreher


Also, keep in mind that these cloud sites are business and business do at times close their doors.  What happens if all of a sudden they shut down? It's happend where your data is basically gone becuase they disconnected from the net.

Then, worst-case scenario, you only lose your *backups* temporarily.  Presumably, if your cloud provider was going under, you would get advance notice anyway and have time to find another backup solution.  Regardless, you still have your original files on your HD, so you just back them up to another cloud provider.

I can still barely get on the net today.

Yesterday's Century Link meltdown is national news.

I've been having the trouble for 2 months that Century Link hasn't been able to diagnose.

I was working on a video at a IT business yesterday...  I took comfort in learning that it wasn't just my connection that was down. Now maybe someone will try and fix it.

Hundreds of businesses in Tallahassee were calling in for support and the support message was... "it's out of our hands... Century Link is down."


That was yesterday... they still haven't fixed it fully and I'm getting knocked off the net every few minutes.

Just do what I do and open two cloud storage accounts from competing firms. Google drive and Dropbox, for example. There's no exclusivity in the agreements. 

ATS


This is a pretty simple thing but something I just started doing myself.  I use SkyDrive myself but I am sure there are many out there.  Although SkyDrive is free.  When you do this instantly your project is backed up onto the cloud.  So even if total hard drive failure you won't lose your work.
 
Just wanted to share in case it helps someone.
 
 
 
 
Before this I was doing this with Amazon.com but had to do it separately, like after I saved normally.  This just feels so secure and easy to do it this way and instant!

Maybe I'm wrong here, but reading through this thread, I think that some people are confusing keeping a backup/archive of your project files on the cloud with working in real-time from the cloud.  I'm pretty sure ATS is talking about using the cloud as a backup only (that's what I do).  The idea is that you work on your local HD, but make frequent backups to the cloud so that, in the unfortunate event that your HD fails, your studio goes up in flames, computer is stolen, etc., you can still retrieve your work.

I can't wait until I can run my DAW in a cloud. To be able to run it from any OS, any machine, and from anywhere I want would be amazing! That's a long ways off, but it's going to happen someday.