I prefer both. Double TB drives on the desktop and a cloud backup in case rabid squirrels prevent me from getting into the house.
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Aperture can use Libraries OR referenced files. So you can keep the files in folders on whatever drives you want and just reference them from various albums in Aperture and itâll be just fine. Difference explained here.
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Since they have an offline mode for google docs and most of the other google suite applications, it would seem if you keep your files syncâed locally it shouldnât be a problem. Other than the google suite stuff, unless youâre doing something unusual, they are probably used for web browsing 99% of the time. In fact, I actually think a chromebook would be a lot less vulnerable than an Adobe-type cloud subscription service where not only do you HAVE to be online, the vendorâs servers HAVE to be online too (and give you permission) to use 'em or you have nothing.
I love my Samsung Chromebook for Google Docs and casual browsing, btw, though I understand itâs a very limited device.
I have one TB drive in the house, and one in my safety deposit box, and they swap places every month or so.
There are advantages to living in the boonies, but fast internet isnât one of them. Thanks, AT&T. If I had something faster than DSL Iâd probably add a cloud backup, Iâm afraid it would take weeks to upload.
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Aperture does photography, but not really image editing. For example, it wonât do perspective correction or let me slice objects out of a background and reassemble them in a collage. (Or at least, not without plugins that cost more than Acorn or Pixelmator.)
Acorn and Pixelmator are closer to each other, but have different strengths and weaknesses. Acorn lacks the magic extractor and magic healing brush of Pixelmator, Pixelmator lacks the lossless adjustments of Acorn.
Apparently Adobe is reassuring customers that Lightroom will remain licensed normally, but given that theyâve ignored their customers in pushing âCreative Cloudâ for everything else, I see no reason to trust them at this point.
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Ah the pitfalls of client server architecture. We moved away from it back in the 80âs because of this sort of thing. Some marketing jerk decided to call it cloud and suddenly everyone forgot what we already knew.
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Your system sounds like it works but if you were interested in cloud backup I believe CrashPlan lets you send them a harddrive to seed the back up. If I recall it was a couple hundred dollars to do this but just thought I would throw it out there.
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I donât need new features. I need Photoshop circa 6.0 minus the JRE 6 dependency and minus the installer vomiting garbage all over the place.
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Yep, still running AdobeWhatever CS6âŚ
Have you looked at DEEP by Ironic Software? It might suit your needs.
I thought it was closer to $100 when they offered it to me. I said no and just spent a week hogging all the bandwidth at night.
As Adobe Creative Suite struggles with its license-server outage,
Link has now been 404âd by Adobe.
But one can view a cache of it here.
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With another huge caveat: unless you know what youâre doing and want to babysit the thing, donât host or serve anything. Get a good, cheap, reliable hosting provider to do it for you.
I agree with your post and what I quoted above for the most part, but hosting and serving stuff isnât that difficult if you make good choices in software and hardware. That said, I donât think enough people take into account electricity expenses when they host their own servers for cloud storage, etc.
If anybodyâs got good substitutes for InDesign, Iâm all ears.
http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus
http://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-indesign/?license=free
http://www.maclife.com/article/features/10_free_open_source_alternatives_adobe_creative_suite
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From a business perspective, no, they usually have an incentive to try to draw you in, and they certainly donât want to mess with somebody who has already plunked down the plastic and become a nice recurring revenue stream.
However, technologically, they donât actually have much choice: genuinely âcloudâ systems are fault-intolerant because they depend on the clientâs system, your servers, and everything in between working correctly and DRM systems for client software (which is most of the âcreative cloudâ package) basically have to be built to âfail closedâ, because they would otherwise be pitifully weak. If the default assumption, when the auth server is unavailable, were âEh, Iâm sure itâs just an innocent mistake, and the user seems like a good sort of guy.â, all youâd have to do to âcrackâ the DRM would be add a couple of firewall rules. Hilariously simple. So, if you want it to actually work, you fail closed, with varying degrees of strictness.
Adobe isnât very competent, and hell hath no fury like somebody missing deadlines because you screwed up; but they are actually on the comparatively lenient side (probably because they were willing to accept some piracy in the hope of preventing exactly this sort of damaging embarrassment). The people who are really concerned about pirates, and less about paying customers (like EA), have already experimented with demanding continuous connectivity even for single-player.
Even the nastiest DRM vendor doesnât want mistakes like this to happen, since they are bad for business; but architectural imperatives donât leave them much choice: if you want control, the system must be artificially brittle, because if it werenât cutting out the artificial points of failure would be a trivial exercise.
Crashplan can also be set to backup to personal servers without storing anything in the cloud. There are limitations on how many different computers can be backed up to a single machine (I believe), but at the moment Iâm using that (free) service/software to backup to my home server.
You canât literally open-source your way into a big pile of distributed infrastructure for almost no money; but that does bring up an arguably very important distinction: some flavors of âcloudâ have multiple vendors, or at least a second-source. Something like basic LAMP or Windows/MSSQL web hosting is commodified pretty hard. Something like Amazonâs suite of offerings is a bit less interchangeable(though many useful subsets of it are). This doesnât save you if you go with a single vendor, and that vendor goes down; but (as you correctly note) reliability is easier and cheaper to achieve at scale, and since the vendors all have very limited market power, their ability to mess with you is limited.
Other âcloudâ stuff is, whether by reason of technical lock-in (without the crypto keys, even a protocol-compatible implementation of Xbox Live or Appleâs App Store is dead in the water) or by virtue of a sprawling featureset with no fully compatible implementations.
Both are vulnerable to technical disruptions; but only the latter really offer the vendor dangerous amounts of leverage over you.
I have, for the most part, steadfastly refused to use any cloud services. I have used Google Drive. Twice. It was convenient to pass a rather large files to two friends.
I do not trust the security of the hosting companies since the larger the company the more hackers it is the target of. I also do not trust EULAâs and ToSâs where the company can change the terms at their whim without any discussion with me. Add to that the corporate attitude of âits on our servers so we own itâ and I simply will not trust any cloud service.
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a cloud computer is a computer youâre only allowed to use if the phone
company and a DRM-peddling giant like Adobe gives you permission, and
they can withdraw that permission at any time.
Which is true as far as it goes, but whatâs the alternative?
As I look at the front page of BB, for example, there are numerous video links to a cloud service provider notorious for taking down said videos for bizarre reasons and with little recourse.
And yet I (and you) still keep using and linking to videos hosted by this cloud service provider because of itâs ease-of-use and popularity.
I guess I could go create a MediaGoblin server and opt-out, but I doubt I could do it as efficiently or with the same level of exposure as I can on the popular cloud-based video service.
