Cloud Documents – Storage Made Easy Blog

If you you’ve been following the IT news recently you probably saw the issue that users recently had with GMail. If not you can read more about it here. Imagine one morning firing up your Android phone or laptop and finding your data was gone!

Of course, this does not just affect email systems. It can affect any cloud service you store data with. Carbonite was another high profile example of data loss, and of course there are many others, and no doubt there will be many more.

So what can you do to prevent such loss? Well, you can backup! Exactly like you do with your laptop. At SMEStorage all users, including free users, can backup their emails to their storage cloud of choice, as long as their email provider supports IMAP, the user can start or schedule a backup and just leave it to complete. An effective solution to a horrible problem should it ever arise.

What about you Cloud data? Well, our Personal Cloud Lifetime and business users can choose to ‘pair’ a backup cloud with a primary cloud. This will instantly schedule a sync of all existing data to a backup cloud, and it will also backup any future data uploaded, giving you total piece of mind that your Cloud data is highly available as a backup copy is stored on another cloud. this could be Amazon S3 and RackSpace for example, or MobileMe to Azure Storage, whatever combination you would like to choose!

If you primary cloud goes down or your data is not available we’ll get it from your backup cloud.

The Cloud does not have to be a dangerous place, just take sensible precautions to protect your data.

As a Cloud vendor, one of the most repetitive things we get asked is about Security, and this is often followed by “where are my documents stored” ? Rapidly followed by a soliloquy of questions relating to this, i.e. “How can I prove what country I was in when I signed and uploaded them” “Where where they actually deposited” etc.

These are fair questions, and we don’t pretend to be experts in legislation for document storage which can vary depending on the Industry. What we can do however is try to make our platform easier for you to get these answers. To that end we have added integration with a GEO Location Service for all files that are uploaded. Using a GEO Location service enables us to figure out where you were when you uploaded a document and to what endpoint the document was sent to. We can then store this information with each file.

To access this information all you have to do from the File Manager is click “Show File Info”. There is an example screenshot of this below:

You can see from this Screenshot where the file was uploaded from, and where it was uploaded to, down to the town, country and Country with detailed latitude and longitude. You can also see which Cloud. In the screenshot above this is stored on the SMEStorage Cloud which is underpinned by Amazon S3.

This service works across all 10 clouds that we currently support, if you upload your files to your cloud via SMStorage. If you upload them direct with your Cloud Provider then we will still have some file meta-information but there will be no GEO information.

Note that your file may not end up being stored at the endpoint in which the file is accepted, but you can prove the location at which the file was uploaded and accepted, and with vendors such as Amazon you can choose which region your file storage is restricted too.