Cloud Storage Vs. Local (hard drive)

[snaapz]

I'm a bit of a PC geek. One thing I do is I keep all of the photos I take and I store them on a hard drive on my PC. I also store important documents.

I'll share one nightmare, I got a new Android phone many years ago... it came with cloud storage and sync automatically setup, I wasn't aware.

One day I was teasing my wife and barged in on her taking a bath... snapped some photos and we laughed, I quickly deleted the photos. After a couple months I sold the phone and went back to using an iPhone.

Several years later I got an android tablet, popped in my email address for the account and BOOM - IT SYNCED MY PHOTOS with the cloud I didnt even know I had. There were the pictures of my naked wife I though I had deleted.


I know Google Images crawls and I also know that your cloud is "private"; but shit happens and I'd die if those photos got out.


Are you willing or wanting to embrace cloud storage and start storing all your "stuff" on a server? I don't want to be an old fart stuck in my ways where in the year 2035 I use an old PC and hard drive; where as the rest of the world runs off of cloud technology.

[thelastdisciple]

I find cloud storage pretty good as a means of easily transporting files between devices, getting stuff from the phone to the PC and vice versa.

Obviously with sensitive information, perhaps if you can archive and encrypt your files that'd be better than just tossing something onto cloud storage willy nilly.

At the end of the day the best security will be keeping it away from the internet, use flash storage like thumb drives or SD cards and keep them in a safe place.

[Leviathant]

I have a pretty hard/fast rule for cameraphones: Don't take photos with your phone's camera that you wouldn't want on your Facebook timeline. Realistically, that's not what's going to happen, but also, @snaapz (https://www.echoingthesound.org/community/member.php?u=1579) got a whiff of how connecting a camera to the internet can have unintended consequences.

I automatically sync my photos to Google Cloud, cuz I've got a Pixel 3, but I also sync them to Dropbox and periodically copy them down to my computer. I use Flickr as a curated cloud storage for my photos. My Canon T2i doesn't have internet anything, and I'm okay with that. Those photos pass through Lightroom Classic (not the cloud-enabled version), and what I like there, I save to Flickr, and occasionally upload to social media.

Multiple redundancies!

[theimage13]

Yeah, cloud storage is not inherently bad. Just be smart about what you upload to it. Automatic phone backups? Don't do it unless you never, ever, EVER have anything on your phone that you wouldn't want online. Computer files? It's pretty simple to just select which directories you want backed up, so don't put sensitive shit in any of those directories.

It's 2018. Computers have been a thing for a while. We're smart enough to know that hard drives fail (yes, SSDs included), and what's worse, major natural disasters are becoming more common. Having an external backup is great, until your house burns down / floods / gets demolished by a tornado. What do you hear EVERY time people lose their homes? "It's just stuff", but also pining for irreplaceable things like photos.

Be smart, kids. If it's important to you, have a copy in a separate physical location. And if it's sensitive - encrypt it if it's important enough to back up, or just leave it on local backups if it's not.