In this article I’m going to help you understand a computer term you’ve probably heard but may not have understood, and give you some advice that will protect you from a computer mistake.

There was a rumor floating around that Facebook was shutting down for good on March 15th of 2011. This is obviously not true (depending on your view of Facebook, that may be good news or it may be bad news).

The rumor most likely started with the fact that the original Yahoo Video shut down for good on that date. I want to use what happened as an example to help you understand a couple of things that are very important and will become more important in the coming months and the next few years.

If you’re wondering, Yahoo Video was a video sharing service Yahoo has offered for years, and was basically the same idea as YouTube, only not as widely used.

It may not be as big as YouTube, but it’s still used by millions and millions of people, so it’s a shame it’s going away, but is only a symptom of the larger problems going on with Yahoo at the moment.

As a matter of fact, things are not looking good for Yahoo right now, and the company may not be around at all for much longer — it’s rapidly shedding employees and closing down very popular and widely-used services.

This brings me to one of the main things I want to write about: why it’s a bad idea to trust your files to “The Cloud” and give up ownership of your personal or business data in the process.

There’s been a lot of talk about “the Cloud” over the last few years — if you’re not sure what the term means, it’s basically referring to storage and services accessed through the Internet instead of directly off your computer.

The cloud can provide seemingly unlimited storage and basically gives access to the tremendous computing resources of companies such as Yahoo, Google, Facebook and others.

A lot of companies are spending a lot of money to convince people that they want to put everything “in the cloud” and like to paint it as a huge benefit for you with no risks or downsides at all.

While “cloud-based” services can be very useful, they are not without their risks and I don’t think it’s a good idea to rely on them too much. Let me give you an example of why.

As I mentioned, Yahoo Video is shutting down for good in March. This means that all of the videos stored on the service will be gone forever unless the person who posted the video either has a spare copy or downloads a copy before the service shuts down.

Unfortunately, it’s very likely that a lot of Yahoo Video users uploaded their video and then deleted it off their computer, which was a mistake.

I say this because it’s a known fact that people are heedlessly doing this very thing every day when uploading photos to Facebook or to Flickr, or with videos they’re uploading to YouTube, documents they’re creating or storing on Google Documents, etc.

People do this because they’re not aware of the risks and because the big companies who are sinking their capital into developing cloud-based services are doing their best to convince you it’s the way to go.

But it ignores the fact that Internet connections still aren’t always as fast or as reliable as we’d like them to be (which means if you keep your only copy of an important file online you might not be able to get to it when it really matters).

It also ignores the very real possibility that the company you’re trusting your files to won’t be around forever and could vanish or be bought out with little or no warning to you.

It may seem impossible to imagine Facebook or Google could shutting down, or being bought by another company, but you could’ve said the same thing about Yahoo or AOL not that long ago, and it’s very possible both of those companies will be just memories in a year or two.

This isn’t just an online thing, either. Business history is littered with companies which seemed unbeatable at the time which floundered and failed due to mismanagement or bad luck.

So if you store the only copies of your files online and the company holding on to them for you fails, you could lose the files for good, or even worse, have them sold to the highest bidder and put to who knows what use?

The thing is, in many cases the user agreements you agree to when you join many sites says that you don’t really own the files you upload to them!

So my advice is this — you’ll keep hearing a lot of hype about “the Cloud” in the future and many companies will be encouraging you to store more and more online and not where you have physical access to it (like on your computer’s hard drive).

Try to remember that while this can be convenient, it does have its risks and you should at least make sure to keep copies of your files on your computer AND make sure to back up those files and keep one or more copies (the more the better) where you have physical access to them.

Otherwise you may not have those files when you really need them.

For step-by-step help with backing up your computer the right way, take a look at my easy video lesson courses on:

How to Back Up for Microsoft Windows

or

How to Back Up for Mac OS X

Note: article updated 6-12-11, mainly changing intro from future to past tense.

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

Scroll down for step-by-step, Plain English video computer lesson on
how to fix your Facebook privacy settings…

If you’ve been a student of mine for a while, you know I am very big on personal privacy and security issues and talk a lot about the importance of being careful about what you say and do online as it creates a permanent record that is shared with absolutely anybody and everybody who has an Internet connection.

I’m sure you’re aware that Facebook is an immensely popular social networking website and hundreds of millions of people use the service. However, what not everyone realizes (or thinks about) is that while the site can be a great way to connect with other people, there is a giant corporation behind it who absolutely does not have your personal interests in mind.

This has become increasingly obvious in recent months as Facebook has been making changes it claims are for your benefit, but these changes show a complete disregard for personal privacy by automatically setting your account to share everything it can with the entire world, while also allowing people you may not even know to not only see this personal information but share it with strangers without your permission.

To make matters worse, Facebook has deliberately made changing these settings to give you more privacy more confusing than they need to — in hopes of taking advantage of lazy or inexperienced computer users.

Well, I don’t think they should be able to take advantage of people in that way, so I’ve posted this step-by-step video lesson which shows you how to fix your Facebook privacy settings so you can protect yourself.  The video is about 14 minutes long and not just shows you the steps, but helps you understand what the different settings mean and how they affect your privacy and security.

Note: to make this video as compatible as possible so the most people can benefit from it (including people who might want to watch from their mobile device such as an iPhone or iPad) the picture quality is not nearly as sharp as I’m able to make it on my lesson CDs, but still contains all of the Facebook privacy settings so you can protect yourself.

I will be posting a follow-up video soon where I show you the steps to fix the brand new threat to your privacy called “Instant Personalization” that Facebook recently introduced as soon as the option shows up in my account so I can record it.

To improve compatibility so the site works for not just computers but mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads, I’ve added the video lesson two different ways. The first video player below should play on pretty much any laptop or desktop computer. The second is designed for iPhone & iPad, but should work on many computers and other devices too.

If you see a video player box directly below, watch the video lesson by using the first player. During playback you can click the square button in the lower right corner of the video to make it full screen:

If you don’t see a video player above this line (or it has an error message in it), then you should be able to use the second player below to watch the lesson:

If you want to learn more about how to safely and easily use the Internet while becoming more confident and skilled, you might want to take a look at my easy computer lesson CDs.  I have a set of easy lesson CDs specifically on the fundamentals of safe & easy web browsing and a lot more, which you can learn more about by clicking one of the two links below.

Windows PC users click for Internet basics lesson CDs for Windows

or

Apple Mac users click for Internet basics lesson CDs for Mac

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.