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Comment by jordanmessina | Hacker News Reader

Interesting resolution. I wish Leah went into some of the negative affects living in the "cloud" had, rather than just promote all the services she uses.

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The problem is, most of the negative effects of the cloud are not immediate downsides; rather they are future risks of catastrophe, which people are generally very bad at measuring and accounting for. What's the probability that Google accidentally flags you for abuse and eats your Gmail account tomorrow, consuming your internet identity along with 5 years of email, documents, blogposts, photos, videos, etc.? How do you rationally place an expected value on that outcome?

That's why you use a 3rd party cloud backup service like backupify.

I had never given it much though, but Tuesday my primary gmail account went down. This (http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png) is all I've seen of it since then. My contacts, calendar, lunch plans, flight reservations, all are unavailable to me. It's made this week rather a catastrophe. It's also made me reconsider my dependence on the cloud and I'm going to start the new year off trying to take back control.

I've had no indication from Google as to when it might be back, but I see in some forum postings that at least one person with the same error message had 84 days of downtime. It's sort of a black swan thing - very unlikely, but with such great consequences that it's worth avoiding.

Nothing negative happened at all! I think the difficult part was realizing that I didn't need so much "stuff" and it took a while to adjust to not owning everything myself. However, I wish I had done this sooner.

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