There are many reasons why smart people don’t blindly store all their files on SkyDrive (OneDrive), Google Drive or similar services. Most of them should be obvious, especially the security related reasons, so I won’t repeat those.
Another less infamous reason is something like this:
Now, imagine you completely rely on your being your data as safe as possible in the cloud and then you are just getting hit in the head with this policy. Sure, if you store important data, you probably access it frequently, etc. However, I already met people, including myself, who suffered from premature file deletion, either because the retention period was extremely short or the data was important enough to be backed up, but not urgent enough to be accessed frequently. Sometimes I need something saved that I want to access in 2 or 3 years from now. Well, now Google doesn’t allow you to do that, anymore.
Never trust a big company.
If you want safety, look at these solutions, I personally use in my life (you probably already know most of them):
This is a bit mis-leading as that isnt what google actually said.
But, I def agree that any cloud storage is a problem going forward including dropbox. Thankfully - Google drive and Microsoft OneDrive seem to be used much less overall for linux users as there are not simple, easy to use access to those storage areas.
If you’re inactive in one or more of these services for two years (24 months), Google may delete the content in the product(s) in which you’re inactive.
I use Dropbox and have had no issues with them. I pay £98.00 British pounds a year for 2TB storage. If anything was to go wrong, like the planet getting hit by a solar flare, knocking out the Internet altogether and most probably frying everything in it’s path and this analogy is going no where? It’s a bad example ain’t it? I have all the files backed up onto other hard drives anyway if the worst should happen? I like the service you get at Dropbox, either by installing their app on your computer, or just use the Internet to upload your files. Plus it is down to you if you want to share your files or not. You have a choice when uploading to encrypt your files, or after upload too.
I’ve never and will never ever trust Google with my stuff, with all the electronic spying and selling advertising. Hence why Firefox was invented to give the user choice of which search engine to use. The whole world seems so reliant on the big corporate companies, just because they have money to chuck at their apps and everything works out of the box. They rely solely on the looks and glamour and push their product onto people, with everything tidied away and wrapped up in a bow. Data is important to the individual and how Google can justify deleting people’s data just because they have not used their service for a few months, is beyond me?
I never used my Dropbox account for three years, yet they never said to me, better use it or lose it buster. I have stuff up there from 2015 that has never seen the light of day.
If you’re wanting to trust your data with a company that is so big and untrustworthy then that is up to the end user, all I’m saying is that there is choice out there and it’s that one little word choice that the average Joe and Jane does not realize there is choice where the Internet is concerned. People are so impatient too these days that they don’t bother reading the EULA or agreement when using services they just see it for what it is and click agree. Always read what you’re signing up for.
Then you are smart, but the average Joe isn’t that smart and I don’t expect everyone to voluntarily get involved in advanced backup processes.
Precisely. For such people I have not an ounce of pity left. I personally think, that this type of people is completely responsible for the consequences of such behaviour.
The European web hosting company IONOS 1&1 has a cloud storage offer called HiDrive. We have just subscribed to their ‘Essential’ package, which fits our needs - 250Gb with 3 users for 3euro60 per month (including tax).
Windows installation was clunky to say the least, possibly I also have and use a much earlier version (also 250Gb) that came free with my hosting package and doesn’t seem to have been properly maintained.
There seems to be nothing available for Linux that an ‘ordinary’ user would be able to install without much difficulty.
This isn’t really a FOSS issue and you would expect to pay for this kind of service, but perhaps the FOSS community could encourage IONOS to make the ‘user experience’ a bit easier and above all get more interested in desktop Linux.
AWS, GCS, IONOS, etc. all have a B2B business model at their hands. They will never care for single customers with such little demands and little pay, as long as they have business customers that pay thousands of dollars every month for their services. They would barely notice, if a single user would just leave. If you want better “user experience” for private users, you need to rent storage at a cloud service that fully (or at least mainly) relies on B2C relationships.
@crl According to the IONOS website, they implemented the cloud access via the WebDAV protocol which is well supported in Linux. Here is a manual about how to do that.
It can be mounted in /etc/fstab just like any other storage device and you can easily upload/download/synchronize as you wish.
Thanks for the information. Your link is available only in German & I can only do English and French. I’m sure I’ll be able to find a manual elsewhere.
To be fair, the tarifs at IONOS seem quite reasonable for private users like me - cloud storage starts at 1 euro per month - and the services are particularly reliable. The only crash in ten years or more involved some lost mails from a Sent box. There is also plenty of help, though I prefer to start by trying on my own as a way of learning how things work. There does seem to be a lack of instruction manuals or operating procedures that provide all the information in one place.
Possibly a bit off-topic (though some people may prefer to stay with one service provider) I ought to mention that I don’t use the paid-for IONOS website creation services. It’s much cheaper to use Toweb, which connects easily via FTP; I’m getting too old now to try learning FOSS web creation software for desktops.
I guess the need for this technical information ties in with Akito’s remark about the difference between the approaches of B2B and B2C suppliers. However, market leaders like Dropbox operate in both markets, and sparing desktop users from having to know about the existence of remote web content protocols may be one reason for their success (and that of Windows). Several years ago installing Dropbox on Ubuntu & derivatives wasn’t completely painless, but now it’s very simple.
Simplifying the installation and maintenance of Linux software is a frequent thread on this forum. I think cloud storage needs particular attention here because the multi-user aspect (everyone in a group having to use the same service) may reinforce the natural tendency for a market to be dominated by too few providers.
Honestly, even if I still used Windows, I wouldn’t use some weird program to access my cloud storage: I find integration into the operating system as mounted device (“network drive” in Windows) to be more secure and natural.
I miss my dropbox - but when they limited my 11.5 free usage to three devices - I rapidly cut over… tried Mega for a while… but it just didn’t “cut it”… I did actually subscribe to Dropbox pro for a couple of years ($110 AUD for 1 TB)… but the thing that kinda irks me about Dropbox is I have to have that 1 TB space on every device (except mobile ones) anyway…
I’d already mostly switched to “self hosted” Resilio Sync - and that was mainly 'cause I tried Own Cloud and NextCloud and found them unsatisfactory - and - ResilioSync has clients out there for just about every platform… so that’s my main “cloud storage” solution - NONE of it is stored on any cloud but my own… And it has a plug and play plugin for my NAS (FreeNAS).
What do I miss most about Dropbox? It was almost seemless whether using my Android phone or my iPad or my Linux (intel/amd only) boxes and Windows and even Mac… and I’ve done a bit of reading about how Dropbox “leverages” Amazon’s S3 storage (the levels of redundancy Amazon use for S3 is astounding)… but given I kinda hate Jeff Bezos…
Note : I still occasionally use my Dropbox “free” account to share stuff with people… and I prefer my 11.5 GB dropbox to my 15 GB google drive - mainly because I HAVE NO F-CKING clue why my 15 GB google drive is using 10 GB - because I can’t mount it properly on any NIX machine to locate the hogs (e.g. I can’t “find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec du -sk {} ; | sort -n”)… Google might be a “Linux” shop, but they’re pretty shit at everything Linux…
I use a paid-for cloud service (SpiderOak) as well as keeping my own set of long-term storage disks.
I am stating the obvious but if you do use your own back-up storage it’s important to NOT keep it at your home. My former work partner lost his house in a wildfire. (We’re in California and these things happen). He got out with a suitcase of clothing and that was about all.
I personally have already planned out what I have to do if I ever get in such a miserable situation. I have always several backpacks ready. I need about 1-3 minutes to put in all my hard drives, including those used for backups. So I’m prepared, in case I still have a chance of getting the most important stuff from my home.
That said, of course it is still recommended to keep backups in several places!
