What if I don't want to save work in "The Cloud"?

[Vagulus]

I work on my own, and only on the one machine.

I have no need to access my work from anywhere else.

I have this uneasy feeling that when I click on the "Floppy Disc" icon my work goes whizzing off into cyberspace. That makes me uneasy!

 

Call me old-fashioned. Call me a dinosaur. Call me a Luddite if you will! I just don't feel happy sending my work off to places unknown and unseen in the clutches of persons unknown and unknowable.

 

How can I ensure that my work stays on my machine and only on my machine?

[Dadgad]

Don't click on the floppy disc icon?

[JD Mather]

Uninstall Autodesk 360 and disable your internet connection for good measure.

[ReMark]

The ideal solution would be to consign your computer to a storage closet and go back to manually drafting your drawings on vellum or mylar. No one will be able to steal them without physically breaking into your residence and you can sleep peacefully at night knowing some Chinese hacker intent on separating you from your intellectual property will be thwarted in his attempts by your bold decision to go "old school".

 

By the way, no one says you "have to" save your drawings anywhere you don't want to. You should be saving directly to your hard drive as standard operating procedure BUT you should also be backing up those files to some media other than a floppy disk. I would recommend a thumb or flash drive. After doing so you put the flash drive in a safe place (lock box?) or put it on your keyring so you always have it with you. Most people have discontinued the use of floppy disks (are you using 3.5" disks?) because of their limited capacity and the fact that over time floppy disks have been known to suddenly and without warning become inaccessible (i.e. - your computer is unable to read the data). Flash drives are smaller, faster and have much greater capacity. They are also very portable and rugged. Some flash drives come with encryption software so if you were to misplace it whoever finds it and tries to access the data will be unable to.

 

If you need to share a drawing with someone how do you currently do it? Do you email them a copy or do you send them a floppy disk?

Edited July 21, 2013 by ReMark

[mikekmx]

like autodesk would ever let us know if they was hacked and all our stuff was stolen

[Vagulus]

The ideal solution would be to consign your computer to a storage closet and go back to manually drafting your drawings on vellum or mylar. No one will be able to steal them without physically breaking into your residence and you can sleep peacefully at night knowing some Chinese hacker intent on separating you from your intellectual property will be thwarted in his attempts by your bold decision to go "old school".

 

By the way, no one says you "have to" save your drawings anywhere you don't want to. You should be saving directly to your hard drive as standard operating procedure BUT you should also be backing up those files to some media other than a floppy disk. I would recommend a thumb or flash drive. After doing so you put the flash drive in a safe place (lock box?) or put it on your keyring so you always have it with you. Most people have discontinued the use of floppy disks (are you using 3.5" disks?) because of their limited capacity and the fact that over time floppy disks have been known to suddenly and without warning become inaccessible (i.e. - your computer is unable to read the data). Flash drives are smaller, faster and have much greater capacity. They are also very portable and rugged. Some flash drives come with encryption software so if you were to misplace it whoever finds it and tries to access the data will be unable to.

 

If you need to share a drawing with someone how do you currently do it? Do you email them a copy or do you send them a floppy disk?

 

1. WRT Chinese Hackers: It might sound a little paranoid but I do suspect that NASA, the CIA, and the NSA don't store a lot of data in "The Cloud".

 

2. I back up to a flash drive which is attached to a lanyard which is attached to my pants! (My machine does not have a floppy drive.) This is force of habit coming from my undergrad years where I used WinZip spanning floppies. I had three sets. One set with today's work on it, the second with yesterday's work on the shelf at home, the third with the day-before-yesterday's work on it with me at Uni. At the end of the day the third one got loaded with today's work, the first one went to the shelf, the second one in the school bag.

 

That sounds like a lot of work but I did over ten years uni without losing work - unlike a couple of Masters students I knew who felt safe having their work on the uni LAN hard drive. Well, they felt safe until a couple of weeks before they were expecting to hand in their Theses and the LAN hard drive died - taking all their work with it.

 

That seemed a good reason to have a back-up system.

 

3. I would share work in person off the flash drive.

 

Anyway - I guess I brought this up because I feel that people (like Autodesk) automatically assume that "The Cloud" is the way to go. I think people ought to consider that very carefully.

 

Thanks for the answer

[ReMark]

I agree with you about AutoDesk and what appears to be their insistence that we all embrace the "Cloud". My main concern would be that some day I find I am restricted from accessing my own intellectual property.

[Chilidawg]

ReMark, in RE Old Floppies

 

I know a guy who has a nice buisness retrieving data from old media. He can even pull data from the 8" floppy or the big 14" hard disk

[ReMark]

I don't doubt that for a moment. But what does he charge for the service? I bet he doesn't do it for free.