I read with interest this morning an article on Fox News about cloud storage and the best ways to organize and back up your files. For reference, here is a link to the article:
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/best-ways-organize-cloud-storage-files
More interesting than the article are the comments at the end of it. It’s clear that people are pretty about their storage and backup solutions, to the point of being unkind.
One commenter says you need to keep you things on a USB drive where they can be disconnected from your computer (and therefore the internet) with the “tug of a USB cable”.
Another says “After 38 years in IT, if you’re dumb enough to use cloud storage as primary source, you deserve whatever happens to that data!”
While I haven’t been in IT quite 38 years, we haven’t had serious cloud solutions longer than about the past 10 years if you stretch it. So his longevity doesn’t add any credibility to his comment.
There are three major services that offer cloud storage to consumers these days, Microsoft with OneDrive, Apple with iCloud, and Google with G Drive, and it’s worth noting that, to date, none of them have experienced a major hack. Accounts have been compromised when people haven’t used secure passwords, but a serious major hack hasn’t happened yet. It probably will at some point, but it hasn’t yet.
All of these services sync files with folders on your computer, so off line storage is effectively built in. If you like the idea of having an external backup, connect a USB drive and back up the folders to which the cloud services sync, there’s nothing wrong with that, but the services available today are increasingly more reliable and outages are uncommon.
Cloud based everything is about convenience and mobility. It is becoming increasingly more available and the security gets better all the time. How you organize things is less important than your ability to be able to access it. (We all know those people with a messy desk but they know right where to grab the report they need, right?) I love and use two cloud based services and can’t imagine life without them. It makes computing on the go so much nicer.