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Apple Wants To Store Your History In the Cloud
bizwriter writes "Most online backup is about keeping the latest and greatest version of what resides on a device, whether a PC, tablet, or smartphone. Three recent patent filings suggest that Apple has a super version of backup on its mind. Someone would be able to go into an application (like iTunes or the App Store), find what material was available at a previous time, and recover any or all of what once was there without having to use a separate recovery program."
I figure that any information I send to the cloud is at danger of being accessed by anybody at any time, unless I've encrypted it myself. The Apple idea could be really effective, but I'd never trust it with sensitive data, any more than I'd trust Dropbox.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Nonsense, Apple clearly invented the cloud. And backup. And turtlenecks.
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Well duh, Time Machine already does this for local or NAS storage, so any extension of this into the "cloud" would obviously include the same functionality.
Inflammatory summary is inflammatory.
G.
I know that "in the cloud" is the hip thing these days; but I'm a bit fuzzy on how this differs in any patentable way from versioning file systems that go back at least as far as VMS, and almost any network backup product that provides differential backups(which is virtually all of them).
Even more specifically, precisely this sort of 'network-accessed version/time view' of documents is what pretty much any IDE does when you point it at a supported revision control system. Complete history of your project, all in 'app', delivered locally or over the network, or clustered, or what have you. Similar, albeit expensive and somewhat niche, stuff can be had for word processing among legal types.
Now, from a user experience perspective, more power to Apple if they can bring the benefits of a revision control model to other applications in a way intuitive enough for people who wouldn't know a revision control system if it bit them. That is the sort of thing that they are good at, and the sort of thing that they can charge a premium for.
Patent worthy, though? Srsly?
It's far more than that, Apple is rumored to be developing a sort of cloud user-space, where you can login on anyone's Mac as a Guest and it will pull all your apps, documents, and preferences from the App Store and iDisk cloud. There's even talk of a Net-booting cloud.
And "APPLE" was stolen from the Beatles.
I only get my Facebook account with a small selection of what interests me and who I have befriended publicly. Hardly my "entire life." :S
The sad thing is that for the rest of us that is our entire life.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So first, any normal business practice becomes patentable if you add the words "on a computer" to it. Now this: anything you do on a computer (e.g. backup) becomes patentable if you and the words "in the cloud" to it??? WTF is wrong with our patent system?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
actually it was given to eve, by a dirty snake in the grass wearing a mac.. sorry that's the iTestament.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
sorry miss read that... i thought it said Adam and Eve, should be Adam and Steve, but where all chums around here.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Why would you want them to? Personally when I delete something, I want it to stay deleted. I'd much rather have every deleted thing gone forever than have everything in the facebook-style limbo of "inactive".
Why would it be mandatory? Mobile Me is opt in (purchase), even time machine is opt-in. Hell, even owning the machine is opt-in. Itunes sharing is opt-in. Where's this mandatory idea come from? Nevar
That would still take quite a long time to upload 12TB.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Uh that's what this is supposed to fix. The labels dictate the terms. Not Apple. So Apple needs something big enough to justify paying the labels giant surcharges to let us all do it the sensible way. Google is working on the exact same thing BTW.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
They didn't claim to invent the cloud or versioning. They claim to have an invention that uses the cloud and versioning in a new way, enabling even a non-technical consumer to apply it to all of their documents without training. No, nobody has done that before.
Steam engine also did not claim to have invented steam.
And yet Apple does not have an easy method to show me what I purchased in the Ap-store for my phone? Or an easy way to just reload all purchased apps if my iPhone gets restored? Or make iTunes not suck so hard?
I wouldn't trust these bozo's to make it easy to get to any information I entrusted them with.