And them going through it to profile you, handing a copy to the government, and the likelihood that they get hacked one day (either en masse or just your account or some disgrunted employee) and it gets out to someone/everyone else just free perks then?
That can be a risk yes, but is easily defeated.
If the files I upload are intended to be distributed and shared, say software I write or videos I publish or whatnot, then that profiling is only a good thing since I want to rise in the search results as the source and creator.
If the files are a backup of personal/company data, stuff not to be shared anyway, I'll be uploading an encrypted container.
Yes, my profile will have a single entry stating I use encryption (which I don't know how to avoid) but my actual data isn't profiled since they can't read it.
You also eat some business risk that they may decide to discontinue the service, with little or no notice.
True, that is always a risk when you go 3rd party and don't do it "in house".
But that shouldn't be TOO much of a problem, especially for the backup situation. By definition backups are a copy, and by best practices you shouldn't ever have only one copy but many. Losing one may be an inconvenience in replacing it, but only a fool would delete their originals after uploading a backup.
(Not to say there aren't fools out there who do exactly that - only to say this is the fools fault, not the hosting provider)
For the distribution situation, it is adamantly a much larger inconvenience and to many more people.
Hopefully a person operating this way has their own domain name and website, and can be the authoritative source for where to download the files.
Then it's just time being spent to upload everything to a new host to distribute and updating the links that point to them.
Yes users wanting to download will be upset, but that's mainly a result of you not having redundancy in place.
I realize redundancy isn't always an option for many reasons, and am not attempting to place blame. (If you can't afford it, you can't afford it.)
But this is the case with most everything online, be it file hosting, web hosting, backup services, ISPs/uplinks using BGP vs a single DSL/cable provider, etc.
I don't see that as a fault with the 3rd party really, just an unfortunate truth to the nature of what we do.
And they may lose it. Google's lost data before after all. They're far better administrators than the average joe consumer, but they aren't magical. You should probably still arrange for another backup.
Agreed! No one is perfect, and expecting otherwise can only bite you.
But for most, especially individuals and hobbyists but small companies too, Google or Amazons (or even Microsofts) admins are going to have more time and people on hand to take care of it.
It's always a cost/benefit to figure out.
That said, I don't object to making use of cloud storage where appropriate... but google storage? Really? Don't they have enough of your data already?
Perhaps. I think this one is going to boil down to personal preference.
There is a certain extent I do trust Google, and a line I wouldn't trust them past. I suspect my line is a bit closer to "trust" than your line is ;}
But assuming we are both knowledgeable about what Google does, what their business modal is, and what specific thing we will be using them for - I don't think there is much either of us can say to move that line for the other much, and that doesn't make either of us wrong.
, compared to paying you anything for the service of "oops, all your data was lost because this crappy consumer level drive failed"
Of course, one could maintain a couple copies. So when the drives inevitably fail, you've got more copies.
According to the statements made which my comment replied to, no actually you can't.
Parent specifically said the solution was one single 4 TB hard drive.
You can't do a RAID with one disk.
You can have multiple copies on that one disk, but that won't help against most failure modes.
Parent specifically argued against all the options that would let you protect a single consumer drive from failure, and didn't even account for other failures such as bitrot checksums, parity to fix said bitrot, or user error (ie deleting something on accident)
And really most data isn't worth backing up. My music / movies -- not going to sweat 99% of them. Vacation photos etc? I replicate copies to my family (and they to me). Odds of all of us losing them at once are near enough to zilch -- that whatever catastrophe manages to do it will probably make the lost photos the least of our concerns.
Strongly agreed there too.
Personally I do not backup any of my movies. I keep my original DVDs and whatnot, and yes it would suck to re-rip everything and sort it nicely again, but it can be done.
My music ended up backed up due to wanting it at multiple locations, but I didn't intend on that originally.
My vacation photo situation sounds identical to yours too. If 5 US states disappear over night including the one I live in, fallout has taught me photos will not be of help in fighting off the raiders and mutants ;P
But - I do have a ~250 MB encrypted volume I DO backup everywhere I can.
It contains my tax paper work, scans of important documents I need to keep for some time, my own unencrypted private certificate authority cert, etc.
I also have a smaller encrypted volume I store with family and friends that contains my password basis and schemes, plus some of the more important ones along with my rotation schedule and whatnot.
My will contains this volumes password and a list of which family members and friends have a copy, intended to be available to my heir once I pass on.
The more help for her in this case the better, since I won't be around to ask!
While these days I run a fleet of my own servers to host files I distribute, I too started out with free hosting online (zomg ftp.netcom.com and geocities!) then moved up to paid hosting (usually of the web hosting form) before finally moving to colo servers and now adding VPSes.
Professionally on the other hand, I do have a metric crapton of data that does need to be backed up. I have ~250 employees here I have to protect against themselves (Be it a boot drive image to be restored after an infection, or files on the storage server to be placed back after being overwritten incorrectly)
But I will fully admit at work I keep everything in-house. They provide much more funds for that than I am willing to spend for myself at home, so thankfully this isn't an issue ;}
In the end it all boils down to the specific case at hand, what concerns one has, and which options are easiest to address those concerns.
But none of that was mentioned in my previous reply, since that was on a pure technical level between a single consumer drive on one PC, and enterprise grade hardware setup by best practices, administrated by competent people.
Hopefully it is clear however that even the political side of the argument isn't as black and white either.