Tag Archives: cloud

The Fragile Free Cloud

Here’s a timely reminder, if one were needed, that you should never assume anything you store online is going to be there for very long, unless it’s on a system (a) that you are paying for and ideally (b) that you run or manage.

Flickr has announced that it’s going to start removing photos from its free accounts: everyone can still have 1,000 images, but that’s much less storage than they offered for free in the past. If you have more than that, they’ll start deleting the older ones first. I starting uploading things to Flickr about 13 or 14 years ago, so 90% of my 10,000 Flickr images will vanish over the next few months.

Most of the Snapchat/Instagram generation are probably not interested in anything that happened more than 1000 images ago! But people who have used Flickr for archiving the first pictures of their children or grandchildren may be in for a surprise. The name ‘Flickr’ might have a certain irony to it…

Now, this is a perfectly reasonable thing for the company to do, and there are several ways you can deal with it: you can start paying for your account, you can download your images if you don’t have local copies, or you can migrate them over to Smugmug (who now own Flickr). But only the first of those options will keep your photos nicely arranged in their albums, and, more importantly, will preserve your image URLs, so I imagine there will be a very large number of pages around the world with Flickr-shaped holes in them where an image used to be. Whichever option you choose, do it before the end of the year.

Now, I’ve been a fan of Flickr for a long time, and paid for an account for about a decade — it’s a good service and reasonably priced — but I switched to Smugmug a few years back because it was a better fit for my occasional bits of professional work. I don’t mind paying for one photo storage service, but I’d rather not pay for two, especially from the same company! So my photo archive has been copied to SmugMug, and I’ll probably need to write a bit of code to go through my blog and fix Flickr URLs. The album arrangements, though, will vanish if I take this approach.

Anyway, the moral of the story is this: You need to look after your own data. Don’t assume that anyone else will do it for you, on a long-term basis, and especially if you’re not paying for the service! In particular, don’t assume that any URL is going to continue to work in the future unless it’s on a domain that you control and manage.

And lastly…

Remember that this will almost certainly also happen at some point to the pages you have on Facebook, the images you have on Instagram and the videos you have on YouTube. Don’t assume that a service will continue indefinitely because the company is large or because it has a model based on advertising revenue. I had stuff on Google Video too…

Update: Thanks to John for pointing me at Thomas Hawk’s post explaining that Flickr’s action is a good thing; yes, I agree overall!

Spinning the cloud

You might think that, of all the household devices that could be connected to the ‘net, a washing machine would be amongst the least useful, except perhaps for the purposes of energy monitoring or service diagnostics.

So I was particularly impressed with Berg’s Cloudwash demonstrator, which emphasises the user interface aspects of connectivity. It’s always struck me that washing machines tend to have particularly awful user interfaces. Until very recently, for example, we had one where program ‘4’ was the one we used all the time. We needed to remember that, and on the rare occasions when we needed a different program, we had to look it up on a card.

Often, by giving a device connectivity, you can also give it a better user interface, even if that’s only used to configure the buttons on the front.

FreeAgent

Here’s a quick and unsolicited recommendation. When I first set up Telemarq, I was looking for some accounting software that I could use on my Mac, since MYOB, of which I was rather fond, is no longer in existence.

I tried GnuCash, which is free, and now really quite good. I used Ledger for a bit, which is splendid if you’re a geek who likes everything in text files. Both of these gave me a lot of control, but they also swallowed a great deal of my time.

Friends suggested I should look at cloud-based offerings, and after experimenting with a few I came across FreeAgent.

I was, I must admit, rather hesitant about this. As a limited company, albeit a very small one, we needed to pay their top rate of £25/month plus VAT. A total of £360 per year. That’s quite a lot for accounting software in a small company. (If anyone decides to try it as a result of this post, please click this link and you might save me a few pennies!).

In addition, I understood ‘real’ double-entry bookkeeping, and this hid a lot of that behind the scenes, so it couldn’t be a real accounts package, could it?

Well, several months on, I just love it. It saves me a huge amount of time – much more than 30 quid’s worth per month, I suspect – does almost everything I need, and is very UK-oriented (so it tells me when my VAT returns and annual company returns are due). It produces nice invoices and send them to our clients, along with links for electronic payment options if they want to use them. It’s very good at importing my bank statements with minimal manual intervention, it makes submitting VAT returns a breeze, and on the rare occasions when I’ve contacted support, they’ve been very prompt and helpful.

Finally, there’s a good API, and various apps for smartphones which make it really easy to log expenses and timesheets.

There are some things I’d like changed: I wish the pricing was a bit more competitive for small companies, I wish they offered a low-cost ‘personal’ version because I’d like to use it on my own accounts, I’d like a few more options when configuring invoices… but all in all, it comes highly recommended.

That syncing feeling…

Just setting up a new laptop here, readers, and enabling Address Book’s built-in sync with Google Contacts so as to bring all my contacts over and… aargh! What is this I see? For some reason, the syncing system has decided that the new, empty address book with zero contacts is the up-to-date version, and so has deleted all my contacts from my Google account to make it match! Woe is me!

Now, I was about to write this up as a cautionary tale of cloud computing: if I didn’t have my own local copy of my data here, I might have been in quite a pickle. But then I discovered that the good folks at Google hadn’t allowed data just to vapourise… there’s a handy option in the More Actions menu of Google Contacts, which lets you restore your lost contacts.

Phew!

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser