I maintain my own backups and have done since 1990.
I use Dropbox occasionally but only to send files to others.
However, privacy IS an issue, though not really a serious problem for most people.
I strongly advise reading the Wikipedia article about Edward Snowden (the whistleblower) and particularly the section under the heading: “Revelations”
To quote:
“The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_(surveillance_program)) surveillance program. [143][144]”
Now, for most people the NSA is not interested in photos of their family and their pets, or the love-letters that might be exchanged between couples, but if, for example, a few people were collaborating and preparing a lawsuit against a Federal department, that would be a different story and would affect the things they said to each other in their correspondence, or the information they kept in documents stored online. The NSA is able to access and read these things.
ALSO. Don’t forget the origins of the internet. It began as the ARPANET, a US Military/Security system for keeping the Federal Gov’ts most important secrets and data safe, by backing it up and reproducing it in many locations that could not all be detroyed in case of nuclear attack. Over time the US Gov’t allowed the general public to start using this network until it morphed into the internet as we know it today
It follows then that the US Gov’t has all the knowledge, tools and resources that it needs to monitor everything on the internet. The only thing that really prevents them from reading everything sent on the internet is the sheer volume of information transmitted every minute of every day.
Um, why don’t you log into Google’s web interface for Google drive(drive.google.com) and find out? It shows you everything that is in your Google Drive storage.
I hope this happens from time to time to every big tech company’s services. However, I doubt Facebook and Google are stupid enough, to let their users’ precious data go accidentally. They have so much redundancy and safety measures to prevent that, it is nearly impossible.
Sure I can do that - but - what I can’t do is mount it on my Linux system so I can use my CLI to navigate and prune and housekeep (e.g. ‘find $gdrive -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec du -sk {} ; |sort -n’)… there’s probably a way to mount it - but I’m not ready to risk it - because I tried on one of my 20.04 (when it was still 18.04) machines and I’ve got a “bookmark” to it in Nautilus that’s still there, that I can’t use or remove, it’s not a biggie, but it’s an annoying glitch (note : it’s not listed in ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs !).
My Dropbox syncs from/to a “real” folder structure on my hard drive… Resilio Sync the same, and does the trick for me - but I’m sorely tempted to go back to subscription for Dropbox, I just wish they had a like a 1 TB plan that was half the price of the 2 TB plan! Because the way Dropbox works on mobile devices (Android and iOS) is heaps more usable (and reliable) than Resilio Sync…
I do nearly ALL of my file management / manipulation with the CLI… it might not sound like it - but - it does make me lazy - because when I suddenly need to do some CLI filemanagement wizardry on a Solaris machine NOTHING works!
Linux SPOILS UNIX admins with its CLI simplicity,
Here’s what Solaris (not even Solaris 11!!!) find doesn’t have :
maxdepth
xdev
iname (yeah - you can only seach EXPLICITLY case sensitive using just “name”) and there’s a WHOLE heap more functionality I now depend on in Linux GNU find that’s not in “UNIX SystemV” find command… and that’s just “find” there’s a whole bunch of other things “missing” from Solaris that I’ve come to rely on in Linux (e.g. ‘sed -i ‘s/search/replace/g’ FILENAME’ - in Solaris you can’t “-i” - you have to redirect to a new filename, then copy/move that new filename back to the original) - sheesh - Solaris is so PRIMITIVE!
I could install GNU find if I wanted (not as easy as it once was since that F–K Ellison killed off “Sunfreeware” when he bought Sun), but that’s hard to do when you gotta go through F–KING CHANGE CONTROL to install some funky little binary package, and it’s 03:00 am and a coporate/enterprise batch run is about to fail 'cause it’s out of disk space!
I was on MySpace many years ago and lost all my home recordings of the band I used to be in. Luckily I still have the recordings on tape, just need to convert over to my computer. When the original MySpace was running, made lots of online friends and communicated with various bands, plus listened to some good stuff. Then life got in the way, did not go on there for a few years, then one day tried finding them and there it was, was not there was it? Gone forever.
Really very sad story, thanks.
I just wanted to say that trusting only “the cloud” for storing data is not the most safe in my point of view. Before reading such accidents my biggest fear was not really to loose the data itself, but that free cloud-stored data get paid in the minute I need to get it back, download them. Those accidents just showed that it’s not impossible to loose the data itself too. Loosing contacts or friends is something I could not think of at all
Makes you wonder though a bit like the Concorde never had a accident or incident the whole time it was in service, then a couple or so weeks before it was going to go into retirement, one of it’s engines blew out. Kinda like MySpace really, was it jealous rivals or bad business?? Still those days of listening to good music and chatting to good down to Earth people has not gone as now have the world of Linux and have met some really down to Earth people on Forums and YouTube, plus have Spotify and Amazon Prime Music, but what I do miss is chatting to the likes of bands through forums and getting to know them.
James Hunter who started out as a Blues singer/Harmonica player in the eighties as Howlin’ Wilf, started his career as a busker, busking the streets of London and getting asked to move on as crowds of people stopped and listened. He has made it famous himself without going down the manufactured side of the music business. There is no other site like MySpace was, it’s all money or political correctness these days. Still I don’t want to dwell on the past, let’s get through this horrible year and see what the new year holds for us.
