I admit it, I’m a fanboy.

So on Monday, I was doing what I could to keep up with the WWDC Keynote. Unfortunately, that meant reading a live-blog between phone calls, but it got enough of the job done. I’m looking forward to many of the new features in Lion and iOS 5.

One announcement that caught my attention was the new iCloud replacement/enhancement for MobileMe. From the website:

iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly pushes them to all your devices — automatically. It’s the easiest way to manage your content. Because now you don’t have to.

Preposition ending sentences aside, this is some pretty cool stuff. I’m already familiar with MobileMe as an option, but now iCloud will be built into the fabric of the software—no subscription required.

King Cloud, by akakumo

Let’s think about this for a moment. You have your Apple account tied into more than one device. Let’s say it’s your laptop, iPad, and iPhone ((I understand that many consumers will only have one of these, but just go with me here.)). Let’s also say that you receive a document with sensitive information via email, and you want to scrub this information from your machines. It’s pretty easy to securely remove a document from a laptop, less so with the iDevices, and now seemingly impossible with iCloud.

Maybe it’s not an email, but a file you save in an area that is automatically synchronized with iCloud. If you securely delete that file, will iCloud do the same?

Now let’s take another example that could be more unintentional. Let’s say that one of my friends stops by my house and wants to borrow a laptop for a few minutes. Maybe they want to buy a book online, check their social networking sites, or scan and fax a sensitive document like an image of a social security card and drivers license. Depending on how that machine is configured, those files could end up in iCloud completely transparent to my friend, and could unwittingly cause disclosure of his sensitive data without his knowledge.

Data destruction and retention is something that bothers me with iCloud only in the sense that people generally don’t think about data classification and handling when it comes to their personal lives. Especially when you have these FANCY PANTSY bells and whistles!

Finally, I’m wondering how Apple will handle the backup and recovery aspect of OS X with Lion. Prior to Lion, OS X was distributed on a DVD with your computer. It contained the operating system plus key repair and recovery tools that you need if your computer crashes. When I lost a drive, I simply put that DVD in, installed, and restored my applications and documents from a Time Machine backup. What happens now?

UPDATE: See a post from OS X Daily on how to make a bootable Lion DVD.

I’m curious to see how Apple will handle the BC/DR aspect of computing with Lion as there won’t be a DVD with the operating system available (as it seems). It must be done through the App Store, which means that if you want to re-install your operating system, you better find a fast internet connection to pull down the 4Gig image.

This post originally appeared on BrandenWilliams.com.

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