Hi Eric, My previous email may have been a little misleading, but I do not recommend deleting the originals from the hard drives/discs/tapes. Clouded data should be better viewed as an extra copy (considering that our lab/office are quite prone to catch fire, and theft too), or a copy that can be easily accessed from anywhere. A disaster on the Clouding servers certainly would not be accepted as an valid excuse for not being able to provide the raw images when their very existence is in question.
Zhijie From: Eric Bennett Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 6:45 PM To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] very informative - Trends in Data Fabrication Then everyone's data can be lost at once in the next cloud failure. Progress! "The hardware failed in such a way that we could not forensically restore the data. What we were able to recover has been made available via a snapshot, although the data is in such a state that it may have little to no utility..." -Amazon to some of its cloud customers following their major crash last year http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-28/tech/29958976_1_amazon-customer-customers-data-data-loss -Eric On Apr 3, 2012, at 9:22 PM, Zhijie Li wrote: Hi, Regarding the online image file storage issue, I just googled "cloud storage" and had a look at the current pricing of such services. To my surprise, some companies are offering unlimited storage for as low as $5 a month. So that's $600 for 10 years. I am afraid that these companies will feel really sorry to learn that there are some monsters called crystallographers living on our planet. In our lab, some pre-21st century data sets were stored on tapes, newer ones on DVD discs and IDE hard drives. All these media have become or will become obsolete pretty soon. Not to mention the positive relationship of getting CRC errors with the medium's age. Admittedly, it may become quite a job to upload all image files that the whole crystallographic community generates per year. But for individual labs, I think clouding data might become something worth thinking of. Zhijie
