The recent and highly publicized failure of T-Mobile’s Sidekick (hosted in the Microsoft/Danger cloud) has again called into question the safety, security and reliability of cloud computing. According to Jon Stokes on ars Technica, “This outage and subsequent data loss is just the latest, and probably the most dramatic, black eye yet for "cloud computing," since users falsely assumed that if data was "in the cloud" then it was stored with enough redundancy and fault tolerance to render such a massive data loss impossible.” Look closely at that statement – “users falsely assumed” that their data was safe in the cloud – and evidently, Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger did as well. I would argue that this is not as much a black eye for cloud computing as it is for those companies that take cloud-based storage for granted without additional backup and disaster recovery plans. No backup system is 100% reliable; that’s why IT departments often implement multiple strategies, such as magnetic tape, redundant servers, etc. We rightfully get asked by customers all the time about the safety and security of their data in KnowledgeTreeLive, our cloud-based (Amazon EC2) document management system. Well, not only do we rely on the massive redundancy of the Amazon cloud, but we also have gone to great lengths to ensure that documents and data stored in the cloud can be recovered in the event of a system failure. For KnowledgeTreeLive customers, we take daily snapshots of working data and keep a rolling 7 days worth of these snapshots. We also keep a rolling weekly snapshot for a minimum of 4 weeks. This ensures customers have a 4-week history of backups. We also go a step further, recognizing that in a worst case scenario, it might be necessary to restore the cloud from the ground. Upon request, we enable customers to back up their cloud-based data locally as an extra precaution and recommend that they do so. Ultimately, the question of backup doesn’t come down to the reliability of the cloud, but to the careful execution of a disaster recovery plan. No storage system is infallible. Now, excuse me while I go back up my laptop!