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Comment by Gurdt | Hacker News Reader

Can someone point me to the flaws of my method? I simply use Google Drive.

Me and my partner have multiple devices (tablet, iPhone, Android phone, multiple Mac and Windows laptops) and we just sync folders to our desktop. We just store everything we don't want to lose in Drive. We share folders we both need. Photo's we take on our phones are automagically backed up in the cloud, music and movies are streamed.

My house can burn down overnight and we won't lose any valuable data.

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The flaw is that you depend on Google. You can not trust them at all, for anything. You can use Drive as a redundant fifth backup either for data that you’ve encrypted yourself or for things that you don’t mind being public, but not as the only place that has your data. Things that could very well happen: you get locked out with no recourse; people at Google browse your data; your data gets mined; your data gets lost; Google messes up and other people get access to your data; Google gets a subpoena and those photos that you thought were perfectly normal are now evidence of a manufactured crime.

Makes you solely dependent on Google. That's not really a problem, but as we've seen many times on HN and elsewhere, there's always the random chance that Google's automated systems can decide that your account meets some unknown criterion to be locked, deleted, or otherwise preventing you access.

It's rather unlikely, but so is the chance of your house burning down.

That's generally the reason people recommend the 3-2-1 rule. By having multiple separate backup solutions, you're hedging your bets. But as is commonly the case in computing, you have to play the convenience vs security/reliability game here and decide where the line between your time and convenience lies against the reliability of your backups and what risks your willing to take.

Although I'm not sure of the rate, people have reported getting banned from google services without notice for seemingly no apparent reason. And there is little recourse to unlocking their account. It's something I personally don't worry about, but something to consider when relying on their services for backing up data.

I do the same with Dropbox. I've been doing this for years and it's saved me a number of times. I don't know if there are flaws with this but it's worked better than anything I've cobbled together myself.

It should work fine until you get into the territory of having to store multiple terabytes of data, at which point cloud services can get expensive.

In addition to what others noted, you are vulnerable to ransomware, as someone in control of your computer can delete everything.

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