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I understand the strategic advantage for offline software for elections and nuclear power plants. For security reasons you can't depend on outsiders, and you've

I understand the strategic advantage for offline software for elections and nuclear power plants. For security reasons you can't depend on outsiders, and you've got long term budget to support in house teams. However in terms of longevity, in the consumer space and corporate space, third party SaaS is much more stable and reliable than offline software. How much of the data from offline software do you keep from the 2000s or 2010s? You changed computers and the data is gone. Yes, many SaaS providers pull the rug, but usually it's fine and you get a chance to migrate the data? If I had to place a bet on whether the files on my desktop will outlive the files on my Google Drive, I wouldn't take it.

atoav 2y ago
You are sure about that? The oldest machine I have seen at my University IT was a server with an uptime of 16 years. Judging be the look it was probably 30 years old. I could name you numerous services that came and went within three decades, granted that old machine did something simple (can't remember, probably a NTP server), but I am pretty sure an external service would have been more unreliable throughout that timeframe.
cesarb 2y ago
> If I had to place a bet on whether the files on my desktop will outlive the files on my Google Drive, I wouldn't take it. I have files on my desktop which have lived on it (and its predecessors) for longer than Google Drive existed. Some might be older than Google itself. That's probably not an uncommon case. You say "you changed computers and the data is gone", but it's far too easy to copy your documents folder (or equivalent) from one computer to the next, either directly or through an intermediate burned CD or external disk (which ends up also becoming an informal backup of that old data). Meanwhile, I have already lost access to at least one Google account (the one which was originally my Orkut account); if I had any files on it (instead of just using it to log into Orkut), I would have lost them.
int_19h 2y ago
I would totally take that bet. As far as personal files that I care about go, there are some that predate this whole "cloud" thing even before it was called that. And these days, given how dirt cheap storage is and how fast transfers are, it's even easier to copy data from system to system and to maintain backups. Heck, we have 8-terabyte USB drives these days.

atoav 2y ago

You are sure about that? The oldest machine I have seen at my University IT was a server with an uptime of 16 years. Judging be the look it was probably 30 years old. I could name you numerous services that came and went within three decades, granted that old machine did something simple (can't remember, probably a NTP server), but I am pretty sure an external service would have been more unreliable throughout that timeframe.

cesarb 2y ago

> If I had to place a bet on whether the files on my desktop will outlive the files on my Google Drive, I wouldn't take it. I have files on my desktop which have lived on it (and its predecessors) for longer than Google Drive existed. Some might be older than Google itself. That's probably not an uncommon case. You say "you changed computers and the data is gone", but it's far too easy to copy your documents folder (or equivalent) from one computer to the next, either directly or through an intermediate burned CD or external disk (which ends up also becoming an informal backup of that old data). Meanwhile, I have already lost access to at least one Google account (the one which was originally my Orkut account); if I had any files on it (instead of just using it to log into Orkut), I would have lost them.

int_19h 2y ago

I would totally take that bet. As far as personal files that I care about go, there are some that predate this whole "cloud" thing even before it was called that. And these days, given how dirt cheap storage is and how fast transfers are, it's even easier to copy data from system to system and to maintain backups. Heck, we have 8-terabyte USB drives these days.