View Single Post
Old 16 Apr 2017, 01:26 AM   #8
jhollington
Essential Contributor
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 371
Quote:
Originally Posted by TenFour View Post
I'm not sure what is the best practice for most people. I go back and forth. I understand the worries about cloud services, but I do believe the most likely scenario for data loss is hardware or local software failure.
Well, I look at it as anything is possible.... While I'm sure it's unlikely that Google would lose your data, I've heard enough horror stories of people being arbitrarily locked out of their accounts and having to jump through hoops to regain access. Then there's always the possibility of a software error or glitch that might cause certain files to be lost, especially if you're tying third-party tools into a cloud-service (something that's especially common for many Google Drive users).

To the original point, while I'd certainly hope that if Google decided to start enforcing the 1TB limit they'd do it in a "nice" way, they'd arguably be well within their rights to just cut off everything uploaded after the 1TB limit was reached. While I strongly doubt such an extreme scenario would ever happen, even blocking a user's account for exceeding the limit could be a huge inconvenience if they were relying on that for their cloud storage (picture a scenario where you've got a project due, but now you've got to spend the afternoon freeing up hundreds of gigabytes of space just so that you can upload and share your documents with your colleagues).

Quote:
I have seen that myself many times, but I don't believe I have ever lost anything stored in the cloud with a major provider like Microsoft, Google, or Apple.
Neither have I, to be fair — at least not through anything that wasn't on some level my own fault (e.g. an accidental local file deletion or corruption that got synced up to the cloud before I realized it). Of course, that's not a "cloud vs local" argument, but rather a case for keeping proper backups. IMHO, services like Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc, shouldn't be treated as backup services, since in most cases, you're syncing data, so if a local file gets deleted or corrupted, the cloud-based copy will as well. Any decent backup service — whether cloud-based or local — will help to mitigate this problem.

Quote:
On the other hand, hard drives and equipment fail all the time. I know of one organization that lost their entire email list because someone had the addresses stored on a single laptop that died. Of course, in an ideal world, we would all have multiple backups of everything happening automatically all the time. That might include several local backup copies and several cloud copies, but in reality most of us simply don't have the time or want to deal with all that hassle. And, doesn't Google have multiple redundant copies of everything in secured facilities with equipment and people monitoring everything?
Sure, but really the key word is exclusive copies.... I definitely rely heavily on both Google Drive and iCloud, but there's virtually nothing on either of those services that I don't also have a local copy of. Since most of them sync data anyway, that's kind of the default position for most users, but once you have many terabytes of data stored in Google Drive, there may be a temptation to save local disk space by removing local copies of at least some of your data. It just seems like a really good practice to at least have a local archive of anything important, even if it's on offline storage.

Quote:
Now, most of the people reading this will probably chime in and explain their detailed and very secure backup routines, but you are not the average person who just stores everything on a laptop and calls it a day.
Well, in all fairness if most users are simply syncing everything to a cloud service anyway, then you're not really relying on it exclusively, and I think that's rather the point..... the average person is going to install the Google Drive or Dropbox client, or simply switch on "Desktop and Documents" in iCloud, and carry on with their day. Unless you specifically play with the settings, you're going to have a cloud-based copy and a local copy of everything, so the chances of running into problems where you've lost access to something in the cloud are going to be minimal (remember, the average person is also equally likely to forget a password somewhere along the way ).

However, I still tell almost everybody I know that they should also keep backups of everything, and cloud-based sync solutions are not a backup service (for all of the reasons I noted above). I'm not even doing anything all that complicated for my backups — I subscribe to Backblaze for cloud-based backups and then use a local hard drive to do Time Machine backups. It's all completely automated and effortless, and nothing that the average person shouldn't be doing — in fact the only opposition I've ever encountered from friends, family, and clients in this area is a reluctance to spend the money on external hard drives or cloud-based backup services, but that ultimately comes down to the question of how much your data is worth to you.
jhollington is offline   Reply With Quote