Opensource slowing down? "GoogleDrive" private cloud

[Tim Watts]

I'm afraid this doesn't fit what I'm after - which is a proper network filesystem that is suited to android and chromebook clients :(

[John F]

Sort of ends up being much more secure on your own servers - they are not even that expensive anymore, and there is much much less likelyhood of getting your pics ripped off and other private things - !

[Charlie Gibbs]

And once you've backed everything up on an external drive, once you unplug that drive, _nobody_ can touch it.

A friend recently lost a lot of valuable photos due to Cloud failure. Even if there's no malice involved, shit happens.

[Robert Heller]

So long as you protect it from *physical* access. Eg. lock the drive in a safe or something.

[John F]

Exactly - and you can purchase a 1TB drive and a fireproof safe to put it in for less than the cost of a years rental on a good cloud server - even if the cloud server is free, it costs you in terms of dealing with the advertizing and spyware etc delivered with all the public services nowadays

[Tim Watts]

But to be useful in today's world, it does need to be accessible to devices - which brings me back to the original problem :)

[Adrian]

I'm involved with a not-for-profit which uses Dropbox reasonably heavily. Data is backed-up automatically to DB, and then the DB account accessed by several people around the country and, on occasion, internationally.

I see no ads, because I run adblockers on all my machines. I'm sure others do likewise.

So what does it "cost" the organisation?

[dennis]

As long as you know one hdd in a fireproof safe isn't a good backup.

The disk will break if the safe isn't waterproof. The disk will break when the safe falls as the building crumples The disk will break when the safe gets too hot as the fire rating is for paper and it costs a lot more for one that will keep a disk safe. It doesn't stop some scrote pinching your computer and the safe. The disk will fail while copying the backup just as the main disk fails. You copy any data errors caused by software to the backup and lose the data.

Do you want anymore reasons why its not a good idea?

[Folderol]

What a load of twaddle. If we're into Armageddon scenarios I don't think anyone would be considering data security!

Also, conversely, if your data is stored remotely.

What if the country the server is in has change of government, a revolution, a nuclear attack, a tsunami, earthquake, meteor strike, blah blah blah.

[Huge]

[45 lines snipped]

My advice is never to store anything "in the cloud" unless you can afford to have it stolen or lost.

You don't even need the safe if you have somewhere "off site" to store the disk - I keep mine in my locker at work.

[Huge]

If you're posting from elsewhere than uk.d-i-y, you might like to know that dennis is a well known idiot. We keep him about so we can laugh at him and poke him with sticks. Virtually everything he posts is crap.

[Adrian]

Failure of a single Tb HDD is hardly "armageddon scenario".

[The Natural Philosopher]

Precisely. Fireproof is nuts. Two locations is all you need

[Nigel Wade]

Why would anyone get a fireproof safe which wasn't waterproof?

Put the safe on the ground floor. Use an SSD.

Anything will break if it gets too hot. But it will last a lot longer than if it wasn't in a fireproof safe.

The weight does. My fireproof safe weighs 70Kg.

As you do with any backup, including copying to the cloud.

Not one of your stated reasons means it is not a good idea.

[Tim Watts]

They probably ought to be - there's a lot of stored knowledge could be used to reboot civilisation - unless we really want to jump back to the

18th century and work it all out the hard way...

[Daniel James]

Fun to test, though, apparently:

Cheers, Daniel.

[Martin Gregorie]

Get two backup disks and backup to them alternately. This way you always have the previous backup in its offline storage no matter what happens, even in the worst case: a massive power spike during a backup that fries both the PC and the disk you were backing up to when it happened.

The really careful and/or paranoid will use a cycle of at least three backup disks.

[Stan Bischof]

I cycle 4 disks: 3 onsite and one offsite, but nothing to do with paranoia. I use them as short-term archive also- not just backup. I've never had a disk failure in 20+ years that needed a true backup ("knock on wood", as they say) but at the same time I _have_ had multiple occasions where it has been very useful to grab a file from a month or two previously. This due to inadvertent deletion, or looking for previous version of the file, etc. Hence 4 disks ranging from current to several months old has served me very well for many years.

As you might intuit, I'm not about to turn over everything I have to Apple or Google or the like, so run my own server and take care of my own data.

Stan

[The Natural Philosopher]

On my server is routine - swap it out and then copy everything to it from the mirror...

[Charlie Gibbs]

Even then, the process will be long and difficult. And it depends on the stored knowledge being readable by whatever hardware remains! How many people can read a 9-track tape these days?

Recommended reading: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.