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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

what do you suggest for cloud storage?

I've had better luck over the years with google drive to store my documents than a physical backup drive. But the thought of losing access to my account scares me

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You will always need backups, regardless of where your primary storage is. These backups could be local or remote.

You have to decide how important your data is. You might divide it into a few categories and decide what you can or cannot afford to lose for each category. For example your password database and family holiday pics are often more important than nearly everything else! Then you decide how much money to throw at all this. It's all a big risk assessment thing.

If you will insist on cloud then please use two of them or one and a local backup system. For really important stuff you can buy a brand that you have heard of 128GB USB stick for about £13 (just checked on Amazon). That's bugger all cash! Buy 10 of them.

Please take responsibility for your data. Use cloudy stuff for convenience but do not lose sight of who really is responsible for it - you.

These backups could be local or remote

backups better be local AND remote.

Why?

I don’t see how that is better than two or three remote backups?

Do I need to change my strategy?

it depends on what your remotes are, and what your risk profile is. consider the problem that your internet access may go down and you are cut off from all your backups, unless one of those is your parents house where you can get to without internet.

I touch my backups less than once a month and I lose internet less than once a month so I think I'd just shrug if those overlapped and I didn't have local backups.

A local backup can be accessed nearly instantly in case you are pressed for time.

egress charges if you have a lot of data.

depends on where you host your data. a decent provider will include a few terabytes of traffic per month. and since you won't have a lot of people accessing that data, your traffic won't exceed that of a moderately popular website.

But that's my point, to answer the question asked. You're mirroring between two cloud providers, one cuts you off and you need to egress all your data ASAP from that provider, to a new one. If you have your primary local, you just push to the new provider free.

Example: my work places all our files, including your docs and desktop folder, on OneDrive. There is a local cache, but they don't actually let you do a full sync to local to minimize egress

Example: they replaced my laptop, I had about a TB of data generated on the old one. It's all in OneDrive. I power up the new laptop. I can't just sync everything to it - they disable that via policy. Every time I open something for the first time, it downloads. So if I wanted to say, copy all my crap to AWS. Now I have to Egress the whole thing from Azure.

Now, imagine you have more than a TB. Not arguing either way - just answering the question.

sure, i understand that. but it suggests that OneDrive may be convenient but ends up being expensive for lots of data. i have a root server, which means more work to set up, but i get 10TB traffic per month included in the hosting price. i am more likely to get in trouble with my local ISP if i download more than 1TB than with my hosting provider.

anyways, we obviously both agree that having a local copy is a good idea either way, and i appreciate your additional examples of the problems that one can run into with a remote only backup

I unfortunately can't answer that. My work gives me double-digit TB OneDrive, and if I need personal stuff on there, I put it in a password-protected 7z file. I don't actually use it all that much though. I just rsync between two laptops in the background and a copy of everything gets pushed to my phone when I plug in to charge at night. I only have about 500GB of data that I care about not losing - like a dump of all my emails in a pst going back 7 years, and some photos and personal video. Rsync does it all w/ 3 copies on local devices, and I don't think about it.

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