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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

We pay for 2TB of icloud data

For what it is worth, the cloud is not a backup because it is one or two failed credit card transaction away from oblivion.

As a rule of thumb, if it is easy or convenient it probably is not a good back up method. But even poor backup methods that are easy or convenient might still be better than nothing. If you are lucky.

Good luck.

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Also: iCloud syncing isn’t a backup solution at all. It makes cloud storage your primary storage, with your phone/laptop SSDs caching parts of that, retrieving data from iCloud as needed.

I think cloud is great for backup - as long as it's not your sole backup strategy. My personal approach is to have a local NAS with redundant drives that also replicates data to the cloud. I'm protected from drive failures, house fires, failed credit card transactions. Obviously not all at the same time, but as far as risks go, feels pretty minimal.

The cloud is great for backups in the something is better than nothing sense. The same is true for SD cards thrown into a shoebox — except SD cards don’t have a dependency on credit cards.

Obviously not all at the same time

That’s the “so long as you are lucky” part. The cloud is great for availability. Availability != Backup.

The cloud is great as the failure mode is statistically independent of the home backup failure mode. So both backups together if they have a 1000 to 1 chance of failing per year would give you a million to 1. You'd need to lose your primary data then hit the 365 million to 1 to lose all data.

Generally they will hold onto data for a while without payment. It’s not like a hard drive needs to be replaced every couple of years — can you prepay cloud like domains?

Spinning disks are very reliable and write once is the only good long term backup strategy.

Backups to restore live systems can involve rewriting and pruning, but live system backups are about availability not archiving.

Prepayment makes financial issues more likely to be catastrophic because the timing of the issue is the mid term of the prepayment period…with a one year period the issue may go unnoticed for more than six month and gmail empties your spam/trash folder after 30 days.

You can stick hard disks in a box and there’s nothing to manage.

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