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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

This is why I always ensure I have a big enough HD. I've used my current cloud backup for almost 15 years, and am really happy with it. But I never rely on them exclusively. If they go out of business tomorrow, I still have all the data locally!

And of course, if my HD crashes, I sync back all the really important stuff.

(OK, I would lose prior revisions of a file - I can live with that).

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I don't know about in this case, but I've heard of both Apple and Microsoft "cloudifying" then deleting local files just found on your drive. I think with Apple, it was music.

The lack of control with closed platforms is staggering. Best make those offline bsckups.

With Microsoft, you can control it - they have to let you control - at least for enterprise use.

I assume Apple give you control as well.

Sane people like me use Linux, though.

> Best make those offline bsckups.

I have that too! A separate HD that I mount and clone to once a week.

That's only if you point the cloud at the directory with the files. For example, if your ~/Documents is on iCloud, it'll happily remove the copy from the actual ~/Documents folder after syncing to the cloud.

However, if you have an external drive at /Volumes/MYSHTUFF, you do not point iCloud at /Volumes/MYSHTUFF. You maintain a copy of ~/Documents at /Volume/MYSHTUFF/Documents. Maybe you use that as your primary work space an sync to ~/Documents periodically. For some apps and workflows (Logic projects, git repos), you don't want your live copy to be the cloud-sync'd copy.

Same with Apple Music. Keep your MP3s on an external drive, place a copy on the internal drive, drag the internal copy onto the Music app.

It's called Virtual Files on macos. In general it's a very useful feature because it keeps files local while they are being accessed which makes them super snappy to work with, and then offloads them automatically when disk space is low.

It does mean you need a separate backup process though.

It is probably not what you are taking about, but apple itunes deleted my entire music collection, first on my iPod, then on my hard drive, as I tried to sync one to the other. That was around 20 years ago.. when I stopped trusting tech.

So when Microsoft force updated my entire office to windows 11 and force uploaded their desktops to onedrive and locked them out because the cloud drive was now full.. I was uneffected (apart from having to fix the mess).

This happened on iPhone, paid-for music gone. Expect companies to shit on you as they grow, Apple and Microsoft are two of the biggest.

Yep, I remember a couple of years ago Google Drive started flagging 1 byte files as pirated content - shortly after I bought a 6TB hard-drive and two 5TB portable hard-drives.

My progress in getting everything off Google Drive and OneDrive has slowed due to real life but all the important stuff is backed up offline now.

1 byte files? I guess there’s only 256 options, someone probably copyrighted them :)

I don't know if an explanation was ever given but I assume their pirated content scanning algorithm inadvertently dropped a file size check and their other checks passed.

Is there a viable alternative to the sync clients - pc/android with cloud/ghost files etc?

No idea, or at least I haven't looked into it. I just manually sync to my drives.

Late last year I could see where all the stuff was starting to go with storage and bought up a decent little amount of HDD's to get a full multi backup setup done. Worth it.

I also have a silly box that I call the 'T Box Series T' that is made out of loads of old PVR HDD's that were donated or found on the side of the road, if they burn out there is no big loss.

Some stuff is online but I have copies of copies of everything now.

Shit happens. I had my iMac and Time machine hard drives died 2 days apart...

Well it's not a 'backup' if it's a single point of failure, something you rely on exclusively, is it!

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