Technology 'relatively new'
One of MobileMe's most innovative features is its ability to synch this data with a variety of devices, including the iPhone, iPod touch, Macs and PCs.

“There is a lot of promise for cloud computing, but the technology is relatively new,” said Rob Enderle, president of The Enderle Group, a consulting firm that studies technology trends.

“It works reasonably well for storage, but if you need it for communications, real-time 24/7, the reliability for these services is not there yet.”

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Enderle said Apple additionally may have been hampered because “they’re not known for their servers. They have them, but they’re hardly the largest. They’re basically known for their devices — the individual things like computers, iPhones and iPods — stuff that exists in folks’ hands that never had to scale” to meet the volume of demand generated by a program like MobileMe.

There are other issues still up in the air when it comes to cloud computing.

Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer for the SANS Institute, a national organization that does information security training, research and certification, uses cloud computing when he uses Google’s Gmail, a free, Web-based e-mail service.

So do millions of others who use similar programs from Yahoo or Microsoft Windows Hotmail. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

“One of the big security problems with online services — in particular, Google — is accidental data leakage,” Ullrich said.

“For example, many users accidentally mark their Google calendars (another free service) as public, and everybody is now able to search them,” he said. “You typically find sensitive information like conference calling dial-in numbers, or even bank account and PIN numbers online.”

The tradeoffs involved
Said Pescatore: “Both from a reliability and a security perspective, you trade away some reliability and some security, some safety, by using these free, cloud-based services rather than by doing it all on your own PC.

“For most consumers, Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail, those have actually gotten pretty good from a security perspective. It’s really not much of a risk. The real issue is availability — the service might go out for two or three hours; you never know,” he said.

“The other thing is if something were to crash, or, say Google or Yahoo or any of these people have a fire and everything burns up — well, your photos are gone, your e-mail is gone, there are no guarantees.

“It’s really nice having free stuff,” Pescatore said, “but there is a cost.”

And even though MobileMe is not free, it is relatively inexpensive for the services it offers, once the bugs are worked out, and so long as those services are available to customers.

“For consumers, any of these Web-based programs, Gmail or Flickr — where you might store your photos instead of on your own computer — what you’re getting is a really powerful thing pretty cheap, right?” Pescatore said.

“And the old saying, ‘You get what you pay for,’ even in this Internet age, still holds. You should go into these things knowing you’re making a tradeoff: ‘OK, it’s going to be free, but there might be a day where there will be an outage, and I can’t use this.’ ”

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Which brings us back to backups, especially for home users. No matter where you have your e-mail, digital photos, documents, videos and music — back them up, either on your computer and/or to an external hard drive.

Prices of backup drives are pretty reasonable — a 500-gigabyte external hard drive can be less than $150 — and well worth the peace of mind should a cloudy day come along.

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