That time I laughed at cloud servers and ate my words

Back in 2014 my buddy kept pushing me to move our small business inventory system to some cloud server. I told him there's no way I'm trusting something I cant touch or see, sounded like a scam. Then our on-site server crashed during peak season and we lost three days of shipping data. He had a backup running on AWS the whole time and I felt like an idiot. Has anyone else had a moment where something you swore was fake actually saved the day?

2 comments

2 Comments

river_scott16d ago

Trusting something I can't touch or see" - that line hits home. I was the exact same way about GPS navigation back in 2007. Thought it was just a gimmick that would get you lost. Then I drove through a massive snowstorm trying to find a back road using a paper map and ended up stuck in a ditch for three hours. What I've noticed is a lot of us have this gut instinct to distrust anything that feels invisible or intangible, even when it's actually way more reliable than the physical stuff we're used to. It's weird how we'll trust a leaky roof or a rusty filing cabinet just because we can kick it, but something like cloud storage or digital maps feels like magic until it saves us. That moment of realizing you were wrong is pretty humbling, but at least you had a backup ready to go.

the_william16d ago

My buddy Tom used to laugh at me for using a GPS app on my phone, swore by his folded up paper map in the glovebox. Then he tried to find a new job site in an unfamiliar part of town, took a wrong turn, and spent an hour circling back roads because the map showed a road that had been closed for years. @river_scott is right, funny how we'll trust a map that's months or years out of date before we trust something that updates in real time. He finally broke down and bought a phone mount after that day, never heard him complain about digital maps since.