Appologies, But Not Our Fault

     Sorry for the lack of posts the last few days, but as I'm sure at least a few of you heard that the Blogger system was down for the last couple of days after a failed maintenance update.  So, I'm going to use this catastrophe to highlight one of the huge failings of the computing cloud system, and why personally owned software is still a very important part of personal and business computing.
    What happens when the company you use for cloud services fails?  I'm not implying that Google is going to suddenly cease to exist, but they definitely fail sometimes.  And when you have a lot of your personal work and entertainment invested in the services these big companies provide, you take a monumental risk.  Say you have a business report that is absolutely necessary for a meeting the next day.  You log into Google docs and try to print it off, only to find that the document in question can't be accessed because of a system failure you can't have fixed by your local tech support guy.  What will you do now?
    Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of anywhere access is great.  Bought into it in the days of e-mail with services like Hotmail and Gmail.  But I also believe in being smart about things.  The best solution?  In my opinion, the best solution to problems like this one is synchronization.  The data being saved on your personal system, and on your cloud drive, simultaneously, and the applications, (at least to read the files), as well.