Comment by progman32
5 years ago
From the article:
> Although some Apple services were still working, like iMessage (thank God) and Photos, I was terrified that more services would suddenly become inaccessible or that I would lose the considerable amount of data I have stored in iCloud.
It seems we get a weekly reminder that using someone else's computer does not remove the need for backups. Nebulous you-violated-terms-of-service claims, billing issues, an AI flagging you as suspicious, companies axing services or changing pricing, ransomware, etc are the drive crashes of this decade. Use multiple clouds, or mirror to a local disk. Do what you need to do. Just remember: nobody cares more about your data than you!
I agree, though I think your language comes across as being more complicated than it has to be. If you use Google Drive or something similar, have at least one computer which does a full sync via the default client. To be more secure, set it up so that you have it sync every week or so to protect against accidental or malicious cloud deletion. Having the sync offset probably isn't super necessary since the issues you bring up are most likely to result in the account being disabled; therefore, the machine sync will be unable to login and it will pause syncing but not delete everything that has been downloaded.
Having cloud backups is still really nice to have because while they do come with some new risks, they almost eliminate whole classes of errors like backup corruption.
One other important point is to avoid cloud services that cannot easily be replaced with some equivalent. You are far more likely to live longer than whatever random SaaS company you are using. In this case, you will probably have warning before it goes down, but you need to be able to migrate off of it (migration meaning no important data loss, not necessarily having a fully functional replacement) given a week's notice.
Yep, the proper response is all based on individual risk profile. Full local sync works, cloud backups _can_ work and can solve many problems. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good!
Worth noting that being worried or annoyed about losing personal data stored in the cloud does not imply that you don’t have backups. Restoring from backups is annoying in the best case scenario.
Very true, restoring from backup is risky, annoying, and best avoided (but practice is good if you value the data). The article does serve as a _reminder_, though, which was my point.
Thoughts on using S3 for personal backups?
(Worried about a physical hard drive getting lost or damaged...)
I use it, it's fine as a "third place." Make sure you set the tier of the storage as the default Standard is fairly pricey. I use Standard-IA (Infrequently Accessed), which is still hot-readable but with a high retrieval charge—perfect for what should normally be write-only. A bucket policy ages out backups > 1 year. Encrypt your backups before you write them, of course.
There's nothing wrong with Backblaze et al. either. They may give much lower costs for bulk data. I only back up a few dozen GB so it's not worth opening another vendor relationship for me.
Somebody else suggested "hard drives at a relative's house." What's more likely, you lose S3 access—or your relative's house burns down / floods / is robbed / their kid yoinks a drive to use at school / any number of other disasters? Also, a backup should be as easy to do as possible—having to manually shuttle a drive back and forth from a remote location is probably not the best, unless you are extremely disciplined.
Suggest you research cloud backup solutions.
Myself I pay for Backblaze's Personal backup solution.
There also is Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage (free 10GB tier) if you want something similar to S3.
Assuming you have a local backup too, rsync.net is an interesting option. It even supports ZFS snapshots natively if you're using a NAS. In case of ransomware it's useful to have access to older snapshots.
Myself, I keep everything on my cheap surplus NAS (2 drive redundancy), snapshot regularly, and occasionally sync to an airgapped drive the next town over. I keep a cold copy at my parents house, but that's last-resort.
The important bit is that I've successfully trialed recovering from a total loss of my NAS and house, in case that ever actually happens :)
Frustratingly, the Backblaze personal backup client doesn't support Linux, because they don't want people to abuse the personal backup service for their server, NAS, etc.
S3 is subject to all the same bullshit. If you want to use S3, use S3... but you should still use that local drive as well.
At least you can find someone for support at Amazon.
buy two physical 12TB USB3.0 HDDs or similar and periodically rotate them through storage at a trusted family member's house off-site
A good third option is at the office (remember those?). Tends to be a little more secure than a residential building. Before the human malware I'd bring home the disk stashed in my desk drawer on Thursday, sync the data at home, then re-stash the drive on Friday morning. Good-enough solution for my comically slow upstream bandwidth at home.
The only answer for backups is Tarsnap.
Do they still delete your data if there's a billing issue?