Process Locally, Backup Remotely
Submitted by lev_lafayette on Tue, 08/25/2020 - 00:28Recently, a friend expressed a degree of shock that I could pull old, even very old, items of conversation from emails, Facebook messenger, etc., with apparent ease. "But I wrote that 17 years ago". They were even dismayed when I revealed that this all just stored as plain-text files, suggesting that perhaps I was like a spy, engaging in some sort of data collection on them by way of mutual conversations.
For my own part, I was equally shocked by their reaction. Another night of fitful sleep, where feelings of self-doubt percolate. Is this yet another example that I'm have some sort of alien psyche? But of course, this is not the case, as keeping old emails and the like as local text files is completely normal in computer science. All my work and professional colleagues do this.
What is the cause of this disparity between the computer scientist and the ubiquitous computer user? Once I realised that the disparity of expected behaviour was not personal, but professional, there was clarity. Essentially, the convenience of cloud technologies and their promotion of applications through Software as a Service (SaaS) has led to some very poor computational habits among general users that have significant real-world inefficiencies.