I’ve previously used Google Drive (2 years back) and presently using NextCloud (server from DigitalOcean). I’m thinking to host my own server using Raspberry Pi.
Would love to know how do you store your data.
Depends on what data.
I have several backup servers at home, all powered by Raspberry Pis. They are attached to ZFS storage pools, with ZFS snapshots and additional backups across servers (i.e. they are backing up each other).
For backing up my end-user devices to the backup servers, I exclusively use Borg.
For not the most private data, I use mainly MEGA, but theoretically you could use any cloud, especially when using something like Cryptomator in conjunction with it. However, I consider MEGA having the best commercial general cloud service on the entire earth.
I also use Nextcloud, but that is mainly for its extended functions, like WebDAV, App and Backup integrations in other Android Apps, allowing to back up to Nextcloud, etc. and not for pure and plain boring data storage.
That said, I would strongly recommend against using SkyDrive (i.e. OneDrive), Google Drive or the like for obvious reasons. Even if the data is encrypted. Google is so rich, I am entirely sure they could break any commonly used encryption, if they wanted to use their computing power for it.
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As @Akito mentioned, for sensitive/important data, you should definitely use tools like Cryptomator to encrypt your files locally before uploading it anywhere.
I use Google Drive coupled with Cryptomator to encrypt my important documents. Google Drive is an affordable option with flexible pricing (I don’t need more than 100 GB of storage as of now). You can either do this - or maybe opt for expensive cloud storage solutions that provide encryption like pCloud or Tresorit.
For some documents/info, the easiest solution is to have a dedicated pendrive locally. It may not be as reliable as a RAID setup, but you never know how useful a pendrive can prove to be in some cases.
If you’re worried about this ^, then I’d advise you to invest time to set up your home network. Also, ensure that you’ve come up with a threat model and have secured your network.
Setting up home servers can be time-consuming - but if you have the time, you should go ahead with it instead of choosing any cloud storage provider.
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I used to use a combination of Dropbox and Resilio Sync… I paid for a TB of Dropbox storage for a few years, but then I was out of work for a bit… but by that time I’d “earned” 11.5 GB of Dropbox storage…
So - I slowly moved everything to using Resilio Sync (self hosted) - and since Dropbox dropped the device limit down from “unlimited” to three for free accounts, I’ve pretty much weaned myself off them and their predatory extortionist policies…
I pretty much only use Dropbox if I want to share something with a friend or family member…
Resilio Sync - I love it (except for this afternoon, when a sync of 40 GB of data slowed my newly built RPi 4 do a crawl)… does pretty much all I need…
It has a plug-in/jail for my NAS of choice (FreeNAS), but I also keep a manually running “copy” inside my FreeBSD shell on the FreeNAS box (just my shell scripts)… I keep my shell scripts shared across numerous devices (i.e. mostly Linux)…
For machines with big enough disks, I share my documents and images, and a subset of my music collection (which I also send to my work “based” Windows 10 laptop)… By “subset” I mean approx 160 GB of the music I mostly listen to (opposed to the 600 GB I store on my FreeNAS)…
So - for nearly every machine I use, I’ve got symlinks in $HOME pointing to my Documents, Music, Pictures, and $HOME/bin is on my path…
One of the things I love about Resilio Sync, it’s FAST, it’s pretty reliable, it runs nearly everywhere (Android, iOS, Linux [i386, x86_64, armhf, arm64], Windows) I’ve tried it (well not “nearly” but actually everywhere!).
At the time I was evaluating various “cloud” sharing options, I did try OwnCloud and NextCloud - I found NextCloud the slightly better of the two, but Resilio Sync more bullet proof… One of the things that stalled me with NextCloud (and OwnCloud) was getting a client to work on Linux powered ARM devices, EVERYTHING out there was about using an RPi as an Own or Next Cloud server (not as a client)… Pretty much the same story with Dropbox, there’s no Linux ARM clients that “work” as “no brainer” solutions…
Resilio Sync fit the bill for me - been using it solidly for 3 years now, and happy with the trifling $60 or so I paid for a “lifetime” Pro license, unlimited devices, and up to 5 users…
I’ve got access to OneDrive through work, but never really considered it as an option… Google Drive? Dang! I tried installing a client for Linux, and the damn thing still sits there in my Nautilus favourites/mounts, but I can’t mount it, or even remove it, from the left pane of Nautilus…
Megasync was another option I considered… but so far happy with Resilio Sync (even happier when I figured out how to use an “allowed” port on my employer’s firewall that let me sync from my Office desk to my home network!)…
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I keep all my sensitive data on a veracrypt drive, which is backed up to an external drive once a week, as is all my other data, with an OS backup every month.
Slightly paranoid but having lost data before I don’t any more
Don’t like to use cloud storeage as I prefer to be in totla control of my data
The problem with that is:
- No size reduction is used by default. The drives can get huge super fast.
- Security: yes; Integrity: almost none!
- There is no automatic hash checking of files in the container.
- I have already lost an entire container because it was corrupted. (If you corrupt only a tiny bit of the container, which technically is a single file, then ALL content is lost.)
- The only way to prevent that is distributing the headers files among different places. Preferably on Cloud storage, as you need a lot of redundancy to prevent the previous point. So this way you are defending one huge file with one tiny file. Still not my understanding of backup, if you are truly relying on that data.
The reason for this issue is, that VeraCrypt (TrueCrypt) is meant to lock something away, rather than back something up. If you want to primarily back something up, I suggest using a software primarily designed for backups. The other reason why VeraCrypt works as it is working is because it is meant to be used on a daily basis. Which is not the way backups are supposed to be used.
The cloud is fine as long as everything is “normal” but being a bit over-cautious and perhaps old fashioned, my data is backed up on an external drive that is kept in a separate place and taken with us when we go away from the main desktop system. Clouds can go away!
My “cloud” solution is entirely self hosted… the master copy, “source of truth” lives on my NAS on ZFS RAID Z+1 (or whatever ZFS version of RAID 5 is) zpool… If I lose a disk, I’m still covered… even if I lose my whole NAS… I’ve still got at least 5 computers with all that lovely data I would die and kill for : subset of music, all my documents and shell scripts. If I lost the whole NAS, I would lose all my movies and music I’ve collected over 20 something years… It’s currently got 4 disks in it (2 x 3 TB, and 2 x 4 TB) - because it’s RAID and ZFS, I only get 3 TB on each disk, and then I only get about 7.5 TB of data storage (because one disk is parity)… I’m just about to order 3 x 4 TB drives, which, I will slowly, incrementally, introduce into the raid set (with one as a cold spare - should one fail), and should hopefully get a reported 12 TB (but probably only about 11 use-able) total… seems expensive, but the R in RAID is for redundant… it’s worth it… every f–king cent!
I’ve got a 6 TB external drive… I only bought it to migrate my NAS data in December 2018 - because I did try to replace a failed 3 TB HDD (& a big FU to Seagate!) with a 4 TB, and somehow I appended it (concat) to the pool instead of making it a RAID 5 member… I’ve never used it since I did that migration… an external HDD is a very vulnerable single point of failure… two copies of my data is not enough redundancy… two points of failure is too many for my comfort…
I could download all those movies and tvshows again, most/all of that music… but I’d still have 5 copies of the main music collection I listen to, 9 copies of all my documents and photos, and 12 copies of all my shell scripts and configurations…
I kinda miss my Dropbox dependance, sure it was kinda like heroin, mainly because the tech behind Dropbox is Amazon’s S3, and when you look into how it works - it’s impressive - there’s copies of your bits redundantly replicated across the planet… but I only hate Dropbox slightly less than I hate Jeff Bezos… so happy none of my piddlingly trifling $$$ are going to into a trillionaire’s pockets (if you earned $10 a year since the big bang, you’d still not have as much money as Bezos)…
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You preacher, me choir.
Sometimes not possible. Some music that I have on my disk just evaporated from the entire internet. So it is truly not that easy.
I’m all pro redundancy, too. Once you experience a huge data loss of any sorts, you will always take redundancy over size.
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I agree… some stuff I was lucky to find 15 years ago, no longer exists on the interwebs… I can’t think of anything off the top of my head… Actually - yeah I can, there’s an Aussie / Irish movie called “The Craic” - I downloaded a copy yonks ago, there were heaps of seeds back then, but for some reason or other deleted it… In February, my brother asked me to find a copy for him so he could show it to an Irish colleague, and - I found a single copy, with a single seed, and got maybe 2/3 of it - but the rest just sat there for months… his colleague had since moved onto a contract in NZ, no idea what happened after the Covid 19 lockdown…
In 2018 - I got back into the band Blue Oyster Cult, a favourite band of mine from the 1970’s and 80’s, and was hunting a lossless copy of a demo tape one of their members made (I knew it was out there! Former drummer Albert Bouchard demo recordings for Imaginos - from 1985, i.e. three years before a rushed out studio release of Imaginos, without Albert or Joe Bouchard), there were elusive long dead links to torrents, the torrents were all dead - but finally found one, and seriously that torrent sat there in my transmission-daemon queue for 9+ months with zero progress! I persisted, and found a yet more exclusive / elusive link to one of those ratio/subscribe “WAREZ” sites - so I ended up getting it some 9-11 months later as a RAR file… but I got it it… and I hate rar files… Now that thing is GOLD and it lives with sextuple redundancy (i.e. a copy on my NAS, multiple copies in my BTSync/Resilio Sync folders)…
As for redundancy - I hardly ever delete anything these days… and then even if I did, I’m sure a forensics team worth their money could get it back…
also - I’ve actually got spare AMD machines, so even if the hardware my NAS runs on died (a HP NL40 microserver I bought 2011/12) I could just hook up the drives and boot SSD into another machine and presto! I know - I’ve done it before!
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Hmmm….So you don’t trust the cloud 
what are you going to do? 
Ah let’s get physical? Store it on a pen or remote hard drive
Beware… 
THEY are going further to AI or automate this with an Intel Chip….
Ah well – pity that 39 steps guy got shot? No @daniel.m.tripp - not that Memory Man - the third studio album by Aqualung. 
MiM - or woman - Attacks - steady Daniel; not Mirrror Man by Captain Beefheart neither! 
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Bought myself a couple of very large external hard drives a few years ago . They were quite expensive but have bought a lot of peace of mind. One of them I keep under lock and key at home; the other under lock and key at work. If both my house and my office burn down simultaneously then I’m in for a very bad day!
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