Rowan’s Blog

The long saga that is Omnidrive appears to be over. For those of you who don’t know, Omndrive was an Australian startup that offered free online file storage and had some early success.

I have been a registered user of Omndrive for around three years, although I haven’t actively used it in about two years. Their demise raises a very important question about storing your files with startups and in the cloud.

The question is this: should we trust startups with our personal documents? Or more importantly, can we trust startups and the cloud at all? When you have startups that are running on nothing but the few million dollars they received from early investors, with no revenue to speak of, which will rely on a second round of investment in the future to keep them going — can we trust these companies with our personal files (which we may or may not have backups of) or personal information? As the Omnidrive saga illustrates, no we can’t.

Despite being a registered user of Omnidrive for a number of years I did not receive any communication from them by email that they were going under and that my personal files would no longer be accessible from their servers. If that was the only place I kept my personal files then I would be screwed.

So how many more Omnidrive’s are out there? How many more cloud startups will go out of business without first warning it’s users that they have x number of days to remove/backup their files? I bet quite a few.

The core problem with the cloud from the average users perspective is that you just can’t trust it. Just like a real fluffy cloud in the sky, it’s easy on the eye, but it can dissipate without warning.