Always have a way out

The Cloud services we know and love today can become sources of reliance for millions of users. From storing important data to communicating with friends and sharing photos, it all happens in the Cloud and can become a daily habit that builds up a vast treasure trove of your personal data over time. And as with all personal data, you need to have a plan in place should things change.

The recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook highlights this scenario and even without any obvious changes to the service at this stage, some now want to move away from Instagram due to privacy concerns. Whether these concerns are valid or not, a new tool called Instarchive has been created to let you capture and save all of your uploaded photos to your desktop in one swift move. It is a clever way to capture and archive all of your Instagram activity and is the kind of service that all online solutions require.

Always have a way out just in case. No matter what online service you use, you should be aware of how you can export your data and how you can back it up just in case. This is more relevant to serious solutions like Evernote and Dropbox, but if you think about the worst case scenario then you are much less likely to lose all of your data. You can export your Evernote notes in XML format, you can copy your Dropbox files to a hard drive and you would expect to find backup solutions from other services as well. Even if a service does not offer a solution, you will likely be able to find third party online solutions and apps that let you back up and export your online data.

You should treat your online data exactly the same as you do your information held on a desktop or laptop. Back it up regularly just in case the worst happens.