cloud failure modalities

There’s a tale of woe getting some airtime on the interwebs from an angst-ridden New York undergraduate (reading between the lines) who has somehow had an entire, quite substantial, google account deleted. The post’s contention is (or includes) the idea that deleting such a profile is tantamount to deleting one’s life, I think. The facts of the case are murky – I’d link to some Google+ discussions, but I can’t find a way to do that – but regardless of this particular young person’s predicament, the story highlights some bigger questions about trusting cloud services. Continue reading