European Cloud Project Draws Backlash from U.S. Tech Giants | Hacker News Reader

European Cloud Project Draws Backlash from U.S. Tech Giants

wsj.com

116 pointsaloknnikhil96 comments

Many people have pointed to privacy and data issues, but there's also the plain reality that the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for political ends over the recent few years, so having key data stored in the US becomes an increasingly geopolitical risk even for European allies.

I think these mercantilist plays we're seeing from the US are going to cause a lot of long term harm to the tech companies. For national security reasons alone you cannot rely on US cloud infrastructure if the man or woman in the white house is likely to pull the plug at any moment.

You seem to believe the reverse, i.e. EU or it's member nations willing to use its economic leverage for political ends, does not happen? Isn't that rather naive?

>the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for political ends over the recent few years

Are there specific examples you're referring to? Because this is how geopolitics and diplomacy has worked since the dawn of civilization. This isn't something unique to Big Bad USA.

The entity list program against Chinese companies, the pressure on Europe to reject Huawei infrastructure (and accompanying threats in particular when it comes to natsec data sharing), the attack on the German car industry, on French agriculture, the list has been getting pretty long.

And while it's true that this has been the state of affairs for most of civilisation, it wasn't for the last ~70 years. Up until recently, the US was willing to underpin global free-trade without using economic politics as leverage for short-term or one-sided political goals. Which is precisely why US tech companies have become the first choice in much of Europe and indeed around the world.

Now the question is being posed if that is still a good decision. Without this interference, Europe would not think about investing billions and billions into its own cloud infrastructure, and China would not be ditching Android. It could have been smooth sailing for US companies for a long time. If this continues I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even between the US and Europe.

”I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even between the US and Europe.”

I am originally from Germany and I think the main obstacle for this decoupling will be the reluctance of Europe to take defense into their own hands. When things get tough they so far always have relied on the US. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I still live in Germany and I can echo your concerns.

The majority of society has zero interest in doing military service, no respect for people serving in the military at best, to downright hostility at worst, as urban myths and clichés (like that the Bundeswehr is just for racist nutjobs) go largely unchallenged (it is by far and large more ethnically diverse than say most IT departments).

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good thing that we aren’t a militarist country.

But the reason for us being able to afford this kind of luxury is US protection.

And thus it doesn’t matter how much some Germans are annoyed with the US, this social shunning of military service is not going anywhere.

You get what you pay for. Or not...

I remember when the war in Yugoslavia went on. This was clearly a European thing but in the end it was the Americans that did the dirty work while the Europeans did a lot of talking but no action.

Every NATO member plus a whole bunch more was involved in that.

Only after the US went first.

Accurate. Much like how Sarkozy really wanted to bomb Libya but nothing actually happened until Hilary and Obama decided to do it.

French people were opposed to that idiotic intervention, just like the ones in Iraq and Syria. Sarkozy was not re-elected (for this and many other reasons).

So what do you deduct from that fact?

"We bombed the hell out of Vietnam while the surrounding countries did nothing!"

I deduce that even when a country commits atrocities in Europe European nations won’t do anything on their own. Or let’s say Russia invaded Poland they wouldn’t do anything either.

Your deduction is correct. Another more recent example is when America destabilized Ukraine. Predictably, we had no interest in that business either.

> as urban myths and clichés (like that the Bundeswehr is just for racist nutjobs

Is it really clichés when there's plenty of evidence for it? Remember that "neo-Nazi doomsday prepper group" from June [0]? Those guys turned out largely to be police and soldiers.

It's reached a point where the Bundeswehr considers discharging the soldiers who blow the whistle on the problem [1], instead of having to admit having one.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/german-neo-nazi-doomsday-prepper-netwo...

[1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2019-05/recht...

Have you ever met actual people serving in the German military? There are whole teams/cells that communicate to each other in turkish-german or russian.

The truth is, in a society like the German, where 50% of high school graduates want to go to university, it's usually just the lower classes to down-right underclass that even consider the military as a career-path.

Alas, apart from white-trash Germans it is a lot of immigrants that you'll find there.

Indeed, I’m sure it would be impossible to find 20 hours of footage of Members of the Left or the Greens saying racist things. Certainly it would be beyond the bounds of possibility to find a group of German IT professionals being incredibly racist. That could never happen. /s

> Indeed, I’m sure it would be impossible to find 20 hours of footage of Members of the Left or the Greens saying racist things

That's a whole other category than people hoarding weapons for some "day X", or members of the police equating police having to identify themselves (not by name, with a number) to citizens with Jews having to wear a yellow star [0], and dozens of other things, is just not even remotely in the same ballpark than "members of the Left" saying racist things. If one belittles the issue of Nazi networks in Germany going back to the 1940s, still murdering, with all the weird stuff happening to witnesses, all the failures to investigate -- that's orders of magnitude worse than a racist slur, to anyone who knows and cares about the actual situation.

Back to the military though, remember Horst Köhler resigning for basically quoting from the manual of the Bundeswehr? [1]

> a country of our size needs to be aware that where called for or in an emergency, military deployment, too, is necessary if we are to protect our interests such as ensuring free trade routes or preventing regional instabilities which are also certain to negatively impact our ability to safeguard trade, jobs and income.

The relevant Bundeswehr document at that time, from 2006:

https://www.bundeswehr.de/resource/resource/MzEzNTM4MmUzMzMy...

> Deutschland, dessen wirtschaftlicher Wohlstand vom Zugang zu Rohstoffen, Waren und Ideen abhängt, hat ein elementares Interesse an einem friedlichen Wettbewerb der Gedanken, an einem offenen Welthandelssystem und freien Transportwegen.

which translates to

> Germany, whose economic prosperity depends on access to raw materials, goods and ideas, has a fundamental interest in a peaceful competition of ideas, an open world trade system and free transport routes.

So basically, the German president had to leave for openly stating what is official doctrine, and people pretended that it isn't. I wonder what would happen to a little grunt who saw or said the wrong things, or said too plainly what the naked emperor support crowd covers up in bloated, dishonest language.

[0] https://twitter.com/vonDobrowolski/status/117832343007413043...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_K%C3%B6hler#Resignation

I’m not sure what your point is. Could you clarify it for me please? On the one hand you seem to be saying that there are networks of no shit actual Nazis in positions of power in Germany and that they have some organizational continuity with post war real Nazis. This seems unlikely, if only because the Stasi would definitely have infiltrated them and exposed them at some point for a propaganda coup.

As to the Bundeswehr document and Horst Köhler that does seem insane. If German polite society makes the President reign for saying something that anodyne they might as well abolish the military and declare themselves a protectorate, whether of France or the US.

> On the one hand you seem to be saying that there are networks of no shit actual Nazis in positions of power in Germany and that they have some organizational continuity with post war real Nazis.

To this day neo-Nazis are vandalizing Holocaust memorials with slogans like "Hans Steinbrenner did nothing wrong!", the NSU [0] was murdering and bombing their way trough Germany for years, while being in close contact with the German Verfassungsschutz, who actually organized their murder weapon and has a long and nasty history of financing these kinds of networks.

The files about that particular case have either been shredded (which was freely admitted) or are now locked up for 150 years. Turns out the same VfS guy who was in contact with the NSU, was also responsible for the guy who recently went on a shooting spree in Halle.

The worst terrorist attack in post-WWII Germany? The Octoberfest bombing of 1980 [1], committed by a right-wing nutjob, they even shot cops when those dare to go after their guns [1]. We've reached a point where they are openly marching on their old Nürnberg parading grounds [2].

> This seems unlikely, if only because the Stasi would definitely have infiltrated them and exposed them at some point for a propaganda coup.

The Stasi was only a thing in the GDR when Germany was still split in two, the two halves only reunified in the 90s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oktoberfest_bombing

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-torch-wielding-neo-nazis-march...

You are vastly underestimating Marcon's drive to fill the US American shaped power vacuum that emerges with a French-German filler.

Just like you are completely disregarding the possibility that Russia and Europe might end up on better terms out of sheer practicality.

Because that whole narrative about the Russian boogeyman, barely kept at bay due to US presence, is one that's mostly based on fiction, and not actual real politics.

Even Putin knows that a broke and war-torn Western Europe makes for bad customers for Russian gas, which is among the very few things still keeping the Russian economy alive.

>> If this continues I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even between the US and Europe.

Read Robert Kaplan’s book on this topic of decoupling (Marco polos world). In many ways it’s already happening.

Regards to the Gaia effort, I’ve worked with a number of Europe based tech companies in and I find no lack of skills or innovation relative to the US. In fact, I’d say when you combine London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Oslo, Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin and many other markets in Europe, the tech world is more widely distributed and as innovative if not more than the US market. A big part of this reason is that you have many small teams working across borders and cultures. Europe is not just the EU. For example, Norway, while it mirrors EU policy is still separate. Brexit could further diversify Europe from a regulatory landscape. What I see in the end is a place where cooperation, integration and small team competition is healthy and good for the overall marketplace. Could a Gaia effort make that better? I have my doubts... but why not give it a go? What’s wrong with having another approach added to the mix? That’s not to say there won’t be a reason for google, Microsoft and amazon in Europe... they’ve made massive investments there already and probably will continue to do so.

As for a decoupling, I think it is happening but I don’t think it’s for the worse. The worlds order is reshaping and I think while there always will be a friendly Atlantic partnership, it won’t necessarily need to be supported by traditional alliances like NATO.

>>> the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for political ends over the recent few years

> The entity list program against Chinese companies, the pressure on Europe to reject Huawei infrastructure (and accompanying threats in particular when it comes to natsec data sharing)

A couple points 1) political ends aren't necessarily bad ends, and 2) it's hard for me to view much of the Huawei stuff as pursuit of a "short-term or one sided" goal, given there are no American competitors for much of the Huawei equipment at issue.

Has this mostly been a Trump thing? Or was it going this direction before him?

I was going to comment about Trump and Brexit showing us how quickly things can change in a democracy. But I'm too ignorant to know if that's a fair analysis of the situation.

This has been long coming. At least 15 years ago I was at a global Cisco conference and I met the regional manager for emea and Northern Africa. His biggest hurdle was getting companies in his region to buy from a US vendor. In contrast, China would show up with loans, equipment, services and it was not just a company, but a team effort. We often see things through the perspective of the Cold War where Western Europe was effectively a satellite state of the United States. It ceased to be that when the Berlin Wall came down. Historically Europe has had stronger ties with its eastern partners (don’t forget the whole reason Colombus even came to America in the first place was to find a route to eastern markets). So it would not surprise me in the least that Europe would over time revert to its historical alignment regardless of who the American president is.

I have no idea what relevance trade history from hundreds of years ago has to modern geopolitics and economic globalization.

Historically, Europeans didn’t know North America even existed and the USA wasn’ta country

The very same economic globalization that turns out to be rather destructive to the environment?

I wonder if such problems might not end up forcing us to reconsider our trading priorities to account more for geographical distance, instead of just taking that as a given.

The US seems to be geographically closer to Europe than China, so I'm not sure how this point would make Europe choose China over the US.

I don’t think I said anything about physical proximity.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/china-new-silk-road-e...

The first and recent thing I can think of is Adobe disabling their software in a South America country and did not even offered refunds at that time.

This is important, some dude in White House can blackmail you or all your software will no longer work. You will say something military alias but we seen economic wars between US and Eu / Canada

This is from not even a month ago [0], at least a spawned a really useful discussion around open source alternatives.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21184623

> European Union countries are concerned about depending on technology providers that must comply with the U.S. Cloud Act, WSJ Pro Cybersecurity reported in October. The 2018 law requires American firms to provide law enforcement with customers’ personal data on request, even when the servers containing the information are abroad.

I don't blame them. What a horribly short-sighted law.

In retrospect, I'm surprised it took them this long. I'm an American and I wouldn't trust us as far as I could throw us (and with the rate of obesity we experience, you wouldn't be able to throw us very far). I have no doubt that most government agencies with three letter acronyms can look at any data stored on US cloud servers with impunity.

> Some European companies that use large American cloud providers say those services are more competitively priced than cloud services in Europe, WSJ Pro previously reported. Gaia-X could lower transaction costs by standardizing contracts and processes between cloud providers and customers, the German Economy Ministry said.

I mean Hetzner for example is very competitive price-wise, but they are missing a lot of the platform functionality AWS and Azure provide.

Came here to say just that. Hetzner is very much competitive with AWS, and GCP for IAAS - both technology and pricing wise. There are other European companies vying for a slice of the DigitalOcean like market here - I personally use upcloud fpr my personal hosting needs, and it’s been solid.

Those complaining here that it is biased against USA and tariff free trade needs to comprehend the presence of US Cloud Act. If USA truly wants to compete fairly, it needs to obey the local laws and get that shit law out first.

Hetzner isn't really a 'cloud' thing in the same way as AWS et al are, and doesn't really seem to have ambitions in that direction. Which is fine; there's definitely a market for what they do.

> Hetzner isn't really a 'cloud' thing in the same way as AWS et al are, and doesn't really seem to have ambitions in that direction.

Hetzner Cloud is more about IaaS than PaaS, and competes directly with DigitalOcean after the introduction of dedicated vCPU, block storage, and private networks. It's still missing object storage, though.

OVH Public Cloud, on the other hand, is trying to become the AWS / GCP / Azure of Europe – and with unmetered bandwidth is many times cheaper than they are – but at the moment it's still much better as IaaS rather than PaaS.

I m on board as long as the EU governments don't have "special rights" to the data stored in those servers under all kinds of excuses. In many ways, having your data stored on the other side of the earth offers some privacy/security benefits.

The right thing to campaign for is to move data AWAY from all kinds of clouds / hoarders and back into private silos, away from all kinds of grabby governments.

Well of course the EU governments will have special rights. You'll still have to obey EU law after all. But at least there's an extra step before American law enforcement can access that data.

So consider, for most people, it's good enough protection. Because we're not worth the extra step.

What's more, EU law says that personal data can't just be shared with companies or governments. No easy backdoors to your data. I'm no lawyer, but I'd expect that any government, US, EU or otherwise, will have to provide a warrant. Final decision will be with a European judge, not an American one. That means quite a bit.

> No easy backdoors to your data.

In many countries, the easy backdoors are already baked in on a constitutional national level.

See the NSA pressuring the German government to modify its G-10 law, or FAD "legal guidance" operations in Sweden and the Netherlands [0].

Case in point: Merkel might have complained loudly about the NSA spying on her phone for the PR, but I'm pretty certain she was fully aware that this was completely legal to do for the NSA [1].

[0] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140...

[1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-10/nsa-uerberwa...

> EU law says that personal data can't just be shared with companies or governments

Do you mean without consent? because otherwise the governments themselves will share data if asked.

For most things, american law enforcement cannot enforce itself in europe and vice versa, hence the relative "protection" from govt. abuses that remote storage offers.

Yep. This scenario was, in some ways, inevitable. It took nations a little while to catch up to the power that separation of data from a person's physical location via the cloud put in the hands of people and corporations, but they're catching up.

At the end of the day, most users in a few years won't have a choice of no country's government being able to access their cloud state; they may have a choice over which country.

Europeans must be on the right track if the monopolists are complaining

Did the definition of monopoly change while I wasn't looking?

There are no cloud monopolists; there are major players, but nobody has a monopoly.

Correct. The right term to use here is oligopoly.

And considering that they all meet up at conferences and the like, we might even want to toy with the term "cartel".

But yeah, calling them monopolies is altogether incorrect.

They are very obviously competing with each other. Every industry has conferences that all the big players go to, it doesn't mean they're illegally cooperating.

A strict definition of a monopoly says there is only one seller, but in reality monopoly power is a spectrum. When someone calls a company a monopoly they are claiming that they have the power to unilaterally set prices beyond what a competitive market would bear.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/monopoly-power....

Christmas draws backlash from turkeys. News at 11.

The sad bit is that, had these "giants" fought a bit more all those US legislative atrocities like the PATRIOT Act, maybe, just maybe, there would not have been a need for this.

There would still be a need for it, you can't be dependent on others for critical infrastructure.

Especially nowadays. I think it's fair to say that right now the world is going through a "realignment". That generates the proper ratio of insecurities and pragmatic realities necessary for the people of the world to reassess the methods by which they've traditionally solved their problems.

or like net neutrality, which in the end didn't change anything.

Net neutrality is about maintaining the possibilities of newcomers arising. Saying that removing net neutrality didn't change anything is like saying that removing elections doesn't change anything. In either case, it inappropriately freezes the status quo in place.

Dependency leads you to getting screwed over in negotiations... from American IT to Chinese manufacturing. Autarchy is not a serious option but you've got to have options for exiting lopsided relationships.

Having just returned from 4 years living in Western Europe, it is laughable how technologically inept the European Union is when it comes to the internet.

Europeans are competent and intelligent. Their universities are competitively amongst the best in the world.

But there is no entrepreneurial or innovative mindset when it comes to the web. I think the ones that have it move to North America. The ones that are left are disincentivized by a comfortable and productive social environment.

All this to say, I don't have much hope for this project's success, and unlike a private enterprise failing and disappearing, this will not fail quietly, but with billions of dollars, and the ones that will suffer are the European Union citizens who will be forced to use inept second tier technology.

I do agree that there is much less entrepreneurial mindset but there is not less creation.

What the creation leads to is different and I'd suggest two main reasons:

1) Europeans are less likely to make it a business - the safety net might play a role but also just different value sets. I'd suggest that on average Europeans are less focused on profit/getting rich and more on just living a decent life e.g. with work-life balance. So they might run things in their spare time but will be more likely to give their creation away than run a for-profit company with it. See e.g. PGP, Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, OpenCloud & Nextcloud, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ... - many leading FOSS and even some hardware projects are European-lead.

2) Startup success is quite a bit more difficult in Europe due to lower investor/VC availability and a smaller market (burden of translation & different legislations, although EU legislation is slowly converging things). Nonetheless you had Skype, Spotify, TransferWise, etc. But those were all mostly bootstrapped - there's no money available that allows annual 8-or-9-digit losses like with the typical examples of Uber, Lyft, WeWork or Lime.

So its not that there's nothing creative going on, but fewer try to make it a business and of those fewer succeed - and indeed many of those are then bought by or on their own move to the other side of the Atlantic.

Tidbit: actually I've never seen comparison data on startup success rates between countries, just on overall startup numbers.

Also, many Europeans are far less market driven then most people in the US seem to be. A lot of people work in public sectors, where innovations happens but its simply not put to market, because the entire sector is not part of a traditional market based economy. Labour relations are also a lot different then in the US.

What amazing innovation has been happening on the web?

Technically, the last two decades can be summarized as "playing catch-up with mobile and the desktop".

The business plan of most web entrepreneurs is to collect then sell user's data while burning VC money and hoping they'll be bought soon.

The web was invented in Europe; VC-funded American mega-corporations turned it into TV 2.0 (with more porn).

American capitalism is efficient, but morally bankrupt.

https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/

TL;DR the "web" was invented in Europe. Amazing what happy people do when they can think about the future rather than how to pay for medical bills or college loans.

Lots of support from the usual HN "tariffs bad" crowd that shows up when America restricts trade. But now, producing your own stuff _can_ be important strategically? It seems pre-existing opinions of the actor in question are tainting opinions of the activity.

Eh? I mean "in general, tariffs are bad" is not incompatible with "some industries/facilities are strategically important and must be supported". Very few people are calling for totally free markets with no tariffs or government support _at all_, but a lot of people would see them as a necessary evil that should be minimised.

I'm surprised they didn't call the project Quaero again just to highlight how hopeless this is from the start. Talk about being five days late and five euros short!

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

Is there any code for this? Any specific design documents that actually go into detail? All of the PDFs I find don't go beyond the CIO level.

Reads like a typical German bureaucracy project: Lots of requirements but nothing that could even remotely be implemented in time.

I believe that european bureacracy can be successful in building aws/azure rival from the ground up. They better support european cloud providers through some industry association, grants, or establish a university based partnership project

typo, should be read: I don't believe

It's fine either way because anyone European citizen surely read the first comment as sarcasm.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kennethcorbin/2019/07/17/eu-hit...

and then it uses their cloud ;-)

https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/european-commission-adopts-ne...

Does anyone have info to share about the tech of Gaia-X? I mean it's probably mostly about cloud services for the public sector, but then it's also open for other users and I've heard vague hints at service repositories and privacy metadata. Public press info is only regurgitated "industry 4.0" fluff. Peter Altmaier (German minister of economics) wanted to talk about details and roadmaps, but fell off the stage and got injured before he could do so.

If they build it, can Americans use it? Asking for a friend...

This is very strange: AWS had no problems at all creating a wholly owned sovereign Chinese AWS region. Why can they not do exactly the same thing in France?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/china_cloud_setup/

Given the relationship with the US, Russia must have been the first to realize they need their own cloud. I wonder if they built something serious yet? Maybe Yandex?

[1] https://cloud.yandex.com/

Any chance this project benefits nextcloud?

Data has become incredibly important. A see a lot of people call data the new gold, or the new oil. I once read that some European nations stored their gold in the US, and are now having trouble getting it back. Oil is another valuable commodity where the US has always tried to stay in control over. With data, I guess it makes sense that European countries finally want a bit more sovereignty over it.

Could you provide a citation for the claim that European countries have had a hard time repatriating gold held in the US?

My comment is based on some articles from years ago about Germany and maybe other countries having trouble getting their gold back from the US. Googling a bit now results in a couple of articles that say that Germany did eventually get their gold back, but there were some hiccups and delays that made people wonder whether the gold was even there at all.

https://bmg-group.com/germanys-gold-reserves-u-s-paper-claim...

https://www.rt.com/business/445133-germany-access-gold-us-fe...

https://www.kitco.com/news/2017-08-24/Germany-Gets-Its-Gold-...

Turns out everything is fine, but a couple of years ago, people were worried about this. It looks like only Germany was involved and no other countries.

There was major foot-dragging when Germany wanted its gold back. Leading to the obvious conclusion that the gold wasn't there at all, and Germany was just holding worthless paper that did nothing more than point to a line entry in an account book somewhere.

> “Why would it take 7 years, unless there was a possible issue in getting it together, to return 300 tons? It could be done certainly in several weeks or even months – but 7 years?” Lanci questioned. “In my trading days, I’ve taken delivery of gold and silver and I’m aware of the physical logistical limitations. The time requested to deliver the 300 tonnes seems excessive – whether it be 5 or 7 years.”

http://archive.is/m6bEG

I have not heard of this project. While as a european I appreciate the intent, I have zero expectations that this will result in anything other than some pointless spending, on the lines of the "google-killer" quaero[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

... and as a EU project private alternative to the likes of Dropbox, there's Duple, an app that gives you your full private Dropbox at home. Self-hosted, E2EE, and works just like a Dropbox (currently in beta): https://www.duple.io/en/

...or Owncloud [1], or Nextcloud [2], or Syncthing [3], or Seafile [4], all of them free software, none of them needing 'future discounts' like the Duple site promises to 'beta testers' since they are free software.

[1] https://owncloud.org/

[2] https://nextcloud.org/

[3] https://syncthing.net/

[4] https://www.seafile.com/

It actually looks very cool, I'm going to try it.

What would be the business model?

How does it protect your data if your house burns down?

If that is really something to worry about you can just copy stuff off and drop the copy off at a relatives house. These days you can get 1-2TB 2.5" drives for cheap. Off site storage has become reasonably convenient even if you are moving physical objects around.

Dropbox isn't a backup anyways. Have an offsite backup that is encrypted. Could be the cloud, could be a hard drive you keep at your parents' house.

Not how does it, how do you. You should spread the data to an offsite or secondary location.

So, a backup solution where part of the instructions is..."another backup solution"

Come on.

Uh, yeah? A common rule in IT is 3-2-1 backups.

3 copies

2 different devices or medias

1 offsite

If your data isn't that important, then don't.

https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/dat...

A) Cloud backup solutions already abstract away replicating multiple copies for redundancy.

Unless Google/Dropbox/Amazon/Microsoft go out of business, you are not likely to lose data from your backup via act of god (aka data center fire)

B) The simple interface of web solutions is still ultimately that if you want redundancy, just pick 2 (or 3) different providers. Myself - I use Google Drive for backup of my most core files, and Backblaze for the whole shabang.

Right, so you have as part of your backup solution "another backup solution"

My point is backup that's not Offsite is not backup at all.

Defense in depth applies to reliability of backups as well as security :P

There is this practice called "backing up".

If you try it, you might find you can protect your data more easily than you can protect most other things in your house if it burns down.

"E2EE coming soon"

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