In the past, the most common way of storing important documents was to lock them up in a file cabinet. Today, with high demands for quick and easy access to such documents, a file cabinet doesn’t cut it. In the past couple of years, there have been increasing developments in a new technology in an attempt to help solve this problem: cloud storage.

This technology saves data to an off-site storage system maintained by a third party, which provides access through the Internet. This method of storing data has become very popular lately with Microsoft recently improving the speed and efficiency of its SkyDrive cloud-based storage service, Apple’s introduction of the iCloud for online storage of music, photos, files and software, and the development of other various cloud storage sites such as Amazon Cloud Drive and Google’s Gmail, Docs, and Picasa.

Last Sunday, the cloud storage site Dropbox, used by 25 million customers for storing documents, videos, and photos, among other files, experienced a glitch that allowed visitors of the site to use any password to log in to customers’ accounts. While Dropbox says that the problem was fixed within five minutes of its discovery, the site’s accounts remained accessible to all for four hours prior to being fixed. On Monday, Dropbox posted a blog explaining that, “a bug affecting our authentication mechanism” was introduced when a code was updated on Sunday morning. Dropbox promised it would investigate to see if any accounts were improperly accessed and would be immediately notifying the account owners. The blog ended by saying that,