[rsync]

I think (hope) that there is a distinction that can arise between "cloud" applications and services and "offsite" or "online" applications.

If you plug together a handful of off the shelf Amazon components, slap a label on it, and open the doors, perhaps that is rightly called a "cloud" service ... the end provider has no accountability to you (or your users) and you have no idea what's going on behind the curtain. It's all just magic happening many layers of abstraction away.

But if you build systems, own the platform, write the architecture and provide something that you understand and have accountability for, end to end, I think it can satisfy the skeptics (of which I am one).

So in this case, the researcher that can't store the documents on dropbox ... hopefully he could upload them with duplicity to an online storage platform that was built and run like this[1].

And I hope that this would be possible because such a distinction could be made ...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5638295