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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joseph who wrote (51748)	4/2/1998 12:48:00 AM
From: FuzzFace	Respond to of 58324

< I think removable storage is going to just go away. Instead you will have internet plugs all over the place, just like electric plugs of today, and you will just transfer data from your laptop or whatever using high-speed internet. > Joseph, I like your vision of the future with ubiquitous (and presumably free or nearly free) internet plugs. But I disagree about removable storage going away for all but laptops. I will never trust my financial data to the net. Nor do I believe many will. Removable storage provides a few things impossible to guarantee with internet storage: privacy, security and disaster recovery. They will assure you that you can get all three from the internet. But do you really believe them? I don't and I probably never will because it is impossible to guarantee it. Given what we know currently about snooping internet browsers reporting your hard disk contents back to their masters, it seems the only way to ensure your data remains private is to have it offline when connected to the net. Anything less, and you are at some Java program's mercy. Given the proliferation of computer viri, the only way to guarantee your data is not destroyed is to make it un-rewritable, something only available to removables either through hardware tab, or by virtue of being offline. Finally, if you think in 10 years the internet will have the bandwidth to back up 100 million 10GB PC's every night, you dream of a braver new world than I. In contrast, I believe removable storage will always be big. After college, I started out in the mainframe world. All through the 80's and 90's I heard from mainframers who just got their first PC how great they were because you were not at the mercy of some remote data center with it's unpredictable outages and "not-frequent-enough" daily backup systems. And they said such things even though they worked with, or even were themselves, the people who designed and implemented the systems and backups. So how much faith will people of the future put in some person or computer at the end of an internet connection? Especially when it's their own money and privacy at stake, not just their company's? Think about it. People are paranoid, and for good reason. The internet is great. I love it. But when a site crashes (as one does on me at least once a week) I can walk away, because ultimately, there is nothing important on it. Much better to keep important stuff safe and sound and duplicated on removables.