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It's Data-Loss Week: This Time, It's Snow Leopard

Well, well, well. So it's not just Microsoft, or cloud computing, or mobile technology that's having problems with data loss.

Now, Apple is battling a bugaboo of its own, this one in its highly acclaimed Snow Leopard operating system. OK, so it's not striking that many users, and it's certainly not on the scale of the Sidekick fiasco -- but it's data loss nonetheless.

By the rationale of those who have attacked cloud computing this week based on Microsoft losing Sidekick users' information in its datacenters, we should just drop the OS altogether. After all, nobody makes a better OS than Apple, right? We're always hearing about how far ahead the Mac OS is in comparison to dowdy old Windows or plucky but insufficient Linux. So, with Snow Leopard suffering data-loss issues, the problem of data loss must be endemic to the very notion of an operating system. Right?

Of course not. But that's what the cloud skeptics said about Sidekick. This cloud thing, they said, is just a leaky model that's prone for failures like the one Microsoft suffered. Hey, cloud computing isn't perfect, and it's still developing. But it makes a lot of sense for a lot of partners and companies, and it has a future. The hard, cold truth here is that computing is prone to error and always has been. Pretty much every endeavor in human life falls into that category, but somehow we expect computing models to be darn near perfect and grouse and moan when, inevitably, they never are. Not even close.

So, we're not here to bash Apple. We're only here to say that stuff happens (hey, it's a family blog), and it might be a good idea to have a solid backup strategy in place for yourself and your clients. You'd think people would have figured this out by now after -- what? -- half a century or more of modern computing. But with the shock and awe over data loss this week, that's apparently not the case.

How reliable do you think cloud computing is? Sound off at [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on October 14, 2009


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