Playing in the Consumer Cloud: Amazon Cloud Player  I'm not the
biggest fan of "the cloud." It might just be because I'm kind of
inundated by use of the word. Or because cloud technology seems
to be pushed at C-level executives who make choices that sound
good dollar-wise but who don't necessarily understand the
technical ramifications. Or because it's apparently still not
possible to get a completely reliable Internet connection in the
U.S., not to mention less developed countries. My philosophical
objections to the cloud aside, there are certainly times when
you need to store data remotely. I recently tried to back up my
music to my external hard drive and Windows kept saying the
drive was disconnected. I got it to work eventually (after some
prying with a screwdriver and a little broken plastic) but it
was a good reminder that if you really don't want to lose data,
you keep local backups and backups somewhere else.  You could
call that offsite backup, but marketing people hate anything
that isn't expressed