Shakin' the Family Tree

Many, many geneabloggers have written lots of posts on how important it is to back up your data.

And many of us use a variety of different ways to do that, some of us with all the zealousness it deserves.

And then, we sit back and still second-guess ourselves, wondering if we have covered all the bases.

So when the cloud services became available, I was intrigued.

No worries about fire, flood, tornado or other natural disaster at the cottage that may wreak havoc on my hardware back-ups.

The intrigue has lasted for nearly a year. The thing that kept me from seriously checking into cloud services was concern about intellectual property rights, as well as the possibility of the cloud service being hacked, coming under a DDoS attack or suddenly disappearing altogether.

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Intellectual property rights are a serious issue for me.

If you have read the static entry at the top of this blog, you know I am in this to share. I tell people that right in the entry - particularly about the sharing of photos posted here.

But I also make it clear in that entry that the written content of this blog is copyrighted. I can't copyright factual information about any of the people in my family tree, but I can darned sure copyright my compilation and presentation of that data.

And defend my copyright.

Discussed my reservations today with one of my co-workers, who started doing a little nosing around on the net and found The Ed Bott Report, 7 Cloud Services Compared.

It was one of the best presentations yet on why, even if you hate all that legal mumbo-jumbo, you gotta read the terms of service for any cloud service provider you consider using.

I won't be granting anyone else a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display my content.

Not even in an area the provider considers public. It's *still* my content.

Am off to do some comparison shopping on 2 to 3 terabyte external hard drives...