This week 40,000 Gmail users logged in to find empty inboxes, the result of a software bug. Google has been able to restore lost e–mail from magnetic tape backups, but how secure are data in the cloud? Jonathan Reichental of O’Reilly Media talks about ways to keep e–mails, photos and documents safe.
IRA FLATOW, host:
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I’m Ira Flatow. Used to be in the good old days, about two years ago, the emails you sent and received were stored on your computer, right? Pretty simple. You opened the mail, you looked into your folders, it was all there.
But now lots of people have migrated to online mail. You’ve got GMail and hotmail and Yahoo! Do you have any idea where all your correspondence is stored now?
That’s what 40,000 Gmail users were probably wondering earlier this week, when they logged into their accounts and – bam, there was nothing there. Imagine the shock of thousands of emails vanishing. I know what that would feel like. And I want to know where they all went, lost in the cloud.
But aren’t Internet storage folks supposed to have multiple copies of your stuff stored on servers all over the country, precisely to prevent this sort of thing from happening?
So how reliable is the cloud? Where is all your stuff stored, and what can you do to keep your data safe in situations like this?
Joining me now to talk about it is my guest, Jonathan Reichental. He is chief information officer at O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol, California. He joins us from KRCB. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Reichenstal – Reichental.
Dr. JONATHAN REICHENTAL (O’Reilly Media, Inc.): Well, thank you very much, Ira.
FLATOW: You’re…
Dr. REICHENTAL: Happy to be here.
FLATOW: Where is this cloud? Where is all the data in the cloud actually stored?
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yes, we are in a new world. I liked your introduction there. Things are different.
FLATOW: And they’re changing so fast, aren’t they?
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yes, they are, yeah. Even for people like myself, who need to keep on top of this, the rate of change and the introduction of new technology is keeping us, you know, keeping us up at night.
But, you know, you asked me where is the cloud. At the end of the day, these are physical locations. You know, these are very, very big buildings. They are scattered across the country. Companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft, they have these big data centers.
They’re in – they’re in North Carolina. They’re in Oregon. They’re in New Jersey. And at the end of the day, these are big, they call them server farms. They’re rows and rows of, you know, what you think of when you think of servers. And that’s where your data is sitting. It’s sitting on those machines.
FLATOW: And is it backed up someplace like I would back my stuff up?
Dr. REICHENTAL: They do have backup, and I think they have multiple backups. One of the types of backups they have is one building, one of these large facilities we talked about, is dumping its data on a periodic basis to another data center in a different location. It’s – there’s a huge amount of information traveling over the pipes between different sides of the country.
But having said that, you know, it is new. It is new technology. The ability to scale up the kind of numbers and size we’re talking about here is challenging everyone.
FLATOW: And what form – is there ever a box in which your data is stuck into and put on a shelf someplace?
Dr. REICHENTAL: Well, you know, it turns out, at least through what we’ve all been reading, that Google may also be doing tape backups. And that does sound surprising, that companies still use backups, tape backups. But it’s true. Many, many companies are still using tapes. And those tapes are a place where data is dumped to, and those tapes are then taken offsite and stored somewhere.
One of the things about the cloud is that your information might reside on a server, let’s say, on the West Coast of the country for a certain amount of time. But as the system sees fit, it may certainly move it. So the location of your information may not be static.
FLATOW: We old-timers in the radio business, we love tape.
(Soundbite of laughter)
FLATOW: And we know how reliable it is. We’ve been – you know, we still have tapes lying around that are 20, 30 years old, still play well. And
Dr. REICHENTAL: That’s true.
FLATOW: …it’s good to hear that we’re going back to the future to actually store some of this stuff – in digital form, you know?
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yes. Yeah. I talked to some of my team before coming out here, and we’re still using tapes and – in addition to other technologies. And what we do like about it is certainly the cost. And provided you keep tapes at their optimum condition, in the right temperature, you know, avoid dust and those types of qualities, you could expect up to 30 years of shelf-life. You know, that might be at the top end. But that’s a good record.
FLATOW: Is that longer than what you would expect from a DVD now, burn your own DVD or CD?
Dr. REICHENTAL: I think so, yeah, yeah.
FLATOW: So 1-800-989-8255 is our number. You can tweet us, @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. We’re talking about the best way to back up stuff with Jonathan Reichental, who is chief 
information officer at O’Reilly Media.
What do you do? You’re Mr. Media, back-up guy. Give us your back-up strategy.
Dr. REICHENTAL: Sure, sure. So in my personal life, so I’m doing a few things. Some of them I learned through, you know, unfortunately having had to go through some big disasters.
FLATOW: And we’re all going to go through one, aren’t we?
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yes.
FLATOW: And you’d better be prepared.
Dr. REICHENTAL: You should – you’re guaranteed of having, sometime in the – it could be tomorrow, it could be in the next few weeks or months, but you’re going to lose information.
So if I think about my home computer, right, I love my home computer, and I’m doing lots of different things, storing photographs on there, some of my banking information.
What I like to do, actually, is burn all my information onto a DVD, in fact. And so I do that on a periodic basis. I think I’m doing it monthly now. And what I’ll do is if I’m really strict with myself, I’ll burn two copies, and I’ll bring one of the DVDs to work so that in the event my house is not available or gets destroyed, at least I have another, a back of that – backup of that.
The other thing that I think people should think about, and we often don’t, is backing up your smartphone and your cell phone. So that’s something I’ve done. You know, you can – your phone can drop into the toilet or, you know, if you get a new device, you don’t want to have to spend hours keying in new contact information.
So it’s quite easy. Most of the – all the cell phone devices come with an ability to download and backup the information easily to your computer. And what I do is I would include that backup in the same folder as your other content, and then that just gets burned onto DVD.
Now, I have experimented with a whole lot of cloud-based backups too.
FLATOW: Yes, yes.
Dr. REICHENTAL: And so things like, you know, Dropbox or Microsoft SkyDrive. A lot of these services provide a lot of capacity for free at the personal level, you know, up to 25 gigabytes of space, and you can move your information up there quite easily. So that’s an option too.
FLATOW: And a lot of them are being integrated into vital software that you want to back up, to work seamlessly in the cloud.
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yeah, they really are. If I think about some of the applications we use even in the enterprise, part of the benefit, part of the thing you’re buying into, is that on the back end backups are happening.
You know, if you think about a big – like a provider like Salesforce, who are they do a whole lot of applications, cloud-based applications for businesses across the world, their value proposition is that you’re working in the cloud, you’re storing your stuff out there, and it’s getting backed up for you.
FLATOW: Right. And one of the most important things in my personal experience to back up is a listing of all your passwords to things, right, where you log onto, you make a list. Make sure you have at least three or four copies of what those passwords are in different places.
Dr. REICHENTAL: And not on a sticky on your screen.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. REICHENTAL: Which I’ve seen. Yeah, you know, passwords are important, and…
FLATOW: Your serial numbers, your passwords, things that you just know that, you know, Murphy’s Law is going to happen. Just when you need it, the backup’s not going to happen.
Dr. REICHENTAL: That’s exactly right. You know, I think when you – I like the way you said it because it sounds like you have multiple passwords. What I don’t like to hear is a person has one password for everything, and that’s definitely a vulnerability.
So unfortunately, until we have really cool, you know, biometrics, where, you know, you can touch a device and it knows who you are, till that’s fully integrated into our environment, we’re going to have to memorize or, as you say, store a list of passwords.
FLATOW: Let’s go to the phones. Kitt(ph) in College Park, Maryland. Hi, Kitt.
KITT (Caller): Hi. How’s it going?
FLATOW: Hi there.
KITT: So I was just calling because you said that you – or your guest said that the shelf-life of DVDs was probably less than about 30 years. And I just wanted to confirm that. They actually used to say that they had a shelf-life of almost 70 years, but it turned out that the sealing that happens in between the aluminum and the plastic was actually not as high-quality as it needed to be in order to support that 70-year shelf-life.
You actually get something called DVD or CD rot, which can happen in as little as two to three years if you don’t keep them in optimal conditions, and most people’s houses’ conditions aren’t optimal.
FLATOW: Hmm.
Dr. REICHENTAL: He’s exactly right. I love that. Love that.
FLATOW: Thank you, Kitt. And when you burn a DVD, it’s really a dye in there that the laser is changing color or something like that, right? That dye may fade over time.
Dr. REICHENTAL: Oh, sure. And you know, your home is not necessarily optimum, optimal conditions. People stick DVDs in drawers, and you’ve got air conditioning and you’ve got heating. And people will touch them and, you know, they’re just – it’s not the perfect environment for a good shelf life.
FLATOW: Let’s go to Bill(ph) in Stockton, California. Hi, Bill.
BILL (Caller): Hi. I just want to reconfirm what the – what you were just saying about the dye layers that are used in these. There are different kinds of dyes and some have greater stability than others. I’ve seen literally Memorex-brand discs literally peel off in less than three years. And I’m not talking the (unintelligible) dye fading. I’m talking about, literally, the layer peeling itself off.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
BILL: All it takes is dirty fingerprints and a little bit of time. My concerns with putting everything on the clouds primarily deal with two issues. And then there’s a third concern, that’s the amount of time that most people would have to use to have to actually upload, say, 25 gigabytes of stuff. Most of us don’t have a pipe or the Internet bandwidth that’s big enough to really get the stuff up there very quick.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
BILL: But the two concerns I’ve got are the integrity of the connection between yourself and the server or between the servers so that nobody can actually snoop in. As anyone that’s been around networks very long, a packet is a packet. And if you’ve got the right location, you can sniff or read each and every packet that goes past you.
FLATOW: All right. Let me get…
BILL: It’s like one big camera (unintelligible).
FLATOW: Let me get an answer to that. Good question. Thanks for calling. Yeah. How reliable?
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yeah. Great question, both questions are great. I’m taking the last one. That’s certainly something that every one of us needs to look at when we choose a cloud-based backup provider is what is the level of encryption? You know, when you use online banking, for example, there’s – your assumption is -and it’s very important – that what’s happening between your computer in your hand and the banking provider is – that tunnel, that information is traveling over an encrypted line. So the same thing you should probably be very much looking for in your provider.
You know, there are free services where that mightn’t be a priority. And then there’s premium services where that absolutely is a requirement.
In terms of the upload, the caller makes a tremendous point. You know, you – if you have large amounts of information that you’re certainly sending up for the first time, you are going to be limited by your bandwidth that you have in terms of connectivity.
One of the ways to get round that is the first time you upload it – and let’s say you have 4,000 pictures you’re uploading. The first time you do it, it’s going to take a long time. But subsequent uploads should be just the incrementals, the difference between the big piece and the new photographs you’ve added to your collection. So hopefully, your subsequent backups are going to be much smaller.
FLATOW: Thanks for calling. Our number: 1-800-989-8255. We’re talking about banking up your data in the cloud on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I’m talking with Jonathan Reichental of O’Reilly.
A couple of minutes left. A couple of points to make. One of the – interesting point that came in on the Internet from Pseudo(ph), it says: Will you have a DVD drive in 20 years if you put your DVDs on it, right? How are you going to read them?
And that always – we always talk about archiving. You have to move it up to the next generation, don’t you?
Dr. REICHENTAL: That’s exactly right.
FLATOW: You have to…
Dr. REICHENTAL: You got it. Yeah.
FLATOW: Incrementally, you load things up. And are the companies liable if, you know, they lose your data, for example, this guy whose Flickr account was accidentally deleted? What happen there? Is, you know, is it going…
Dr. REICHENTAL: That was an…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. REICHENTAL: You’re right. That was an accident. And Flickr very embarrassed by it. It’s good – you know, some of it is going to be the fine print, for sure. You know, there is a kind of contract that we enter in with free services.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
Dr. REICHENTAL: Which means that if you’re using Facebook, you’re getting a lot of stuff for free, but you’re also giving up some stuff as a consequence. And that could be the absolute guarantee that everything that you upload there is going to be there forever.
Now, if you pay – in fact, the terms of use are usually different. And there is a commitment there to have the ability to restore your information.
FLATOW: So you’re going to get what you pay for.
Dr. REICHENTAL: I think that’s exactly right. Yeah.
FLATOW: And so that you should pay the fee, maybe whatever. Usually it’s like four or five bucks a month or something like that.
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yeah. I agree with that. I think it – you have to make a decision based on the importance of the stuff you’re backing up.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Of course…
Dr. REICHENTAL: That really is what it comes down to.
FLATOW: Of course, the Flickr guy did pay the fee, you know.
Dr. REICHENTAL: That was the worst case. Yeah.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. REICHENTAL: He – that was the worst.
FLATOW: That’s the sum of all fears.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yeah. So true.
FLATOW: Have you had the experience of opening your email and seeing nothing there? Fortunately, you…
Dr. REICHENTAL: I think I…
FLATOW: …haven’t probably or you would have remembered it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. I have had experiences where things don’t appear the way they should initially.
FLATOW: Right.
Dr. REICHENTAL: And later on, they become remediated. I was a little concerned earlier this week. My – I do all my banking online. And my provider was – the site was down for over a day.
FLATOW: Wow.
Dr. REICHENTAL: And there was a backdoor that became apparent that one could use to get in to the information. And I could always have resorted to telephone banking or walking into a branch, but it was a little weird. Typically, I think our expectation is kind of 24/7. It’s going to be up.
FLATOW: And I think, you know, especially where banking is concerned, you’re really, really scared of that kind of thing, you know, because…
Dr. REICHENTAL: Yeah.
FLATOW: …if somebody – you feel like if you have a Wi-Fi connection in your house and you’re using your laptop to connect to your bank through the Wi-Fi connection, is that dangerous? Should you have hard wire even between your laptop and your server – and your router?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. REICHENTAL: You – no, that would…
FLATOW: That’s okay.
Dr. REICHENTAL: You don’t need that level of paranoia. It really has to do with the way the service is provided and whether it’s traveling over wire or wirelessly. You know, with your banking institution, for example, it should be the right level of encryption independent of the transport.
FLATOW: There you have it. Be careful and back up, and of course even your cell phone stuff, your smartphone stuff, which you’re allowed to do. There’s a lot of stuff on there you don’t want to lose. You know, what a pain in the you-know-what it is just to get your address book back in there.
Thank you very much, Jonathan.
Dr. REICHENTAL: Oh, you’re so welcome. It was a real pleasure.
FLATOW: You’re welcome. Jonathan Reichental is the chief information officer at O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol, California, talking with us about backing up your information. And please, if it hasn’t happened to you, it’s going to happen. So just be ready for it.
We’re going to take a break and when we come back, we’re going to talk with researchers about creating stem cells from your skin. Are they as reliable and as safe as stuff that might be from embryonic stem cells? Some new research that shows that they’re not all created equal. We’ll be right back after this break. Stay with us.
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