Why I’ve happily got my head in the cloud

simple answer?

I use both

I don’t know what Rich is doing to his hard drives. I have only had one external hard drive fail in the past 15 years, though some were pensioned off because they were too small to be useful. I may have been lucky or it may be due to the fact that I have bought expensive drives with FireWire interfaces, and SCSI before that.

It is so easy to do backups that there is really no excuse for not having one or more backups. I use Time Machine to back up my Apple laptop and desktop. It is better than the backup software that I used to pay for.

When I was working I kept a copy of my home files at work and vice versa, to ensure that I had an off-site backup. Now that I am retired I should get another hard drive and ask a friend to look after it for me. Although I make extensive use of Dropbox to share files and photos, I don’t feel comfortable using cloud services for backup and the cost is rather high at present.

Today’s backup of my laptop was completed in less time than it took to write this message.

Hard drives are generally very reliable and what do you think “cloud” storage providers use?

Sorry but it’ll be a long while before I store my treasured photos and personal correspondence on a hard drive in foreign country over which I have no control.

The convenience factor of having files and photos online if fantastic. It makes a lot more sense to distribute links to large numbers of photos rather than clogging up people’s email with a lot of large files that they may not even be interested in. I always have a local copy of whatever I upload, so it does not matter if online storage failed or was temporarily inaccessible.

For those who want to keep information for a long long time these could be the answer. Only £3 per disk and with a Cheap LG writer the odd thousand years rather than than the 5-10 years of most DVD’s. And if one decides to encrypt with TruCrypt then storing the back-up off-site should not be a problem.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2012/07/19/m-disc-the-dvd-that-lasts-forever/

However an easier method might be the Transporter which is now on sale..
http://www.filetransporter.com/#
and this is how it works
http://www.filetransporter.com/learn-more/

I use a bit of a hybrid. On my main computer I store everything locally, but then use a service from CrashPlan that backs everything up to the cloud, which is then accessible to me from any device anywhere. It has unlimited storage and will retain even deleted files if you’d like. Excellent and good value service.
On my more mobile devices like tablets and phones I use skydrive, which works perfectly and even allows me to edit files in office online on any device.

The cloud is a boon to my group. Files are safe and be viewed and edited by any of us on any of our computers. All of our stuff is text: as a result we can store everything in less than the limit of free space. All our file storage is thus free!

my group is glad of the cloud – we exchange files a lot; keeping them in the cloud saves us doing this. Of course we all keep back-up copies of the cloud content. All of our stuff is ‘text’: this means we can get everything into the cloud without going over the space limit and incuring charges. Great!

I started life designing disk controllers and computers and in my experience it is not IF but WHEN something fails – its natures way! I too am concerned about the security and availability of someone’s cloud facility.

So I use Sky Drive to store teaching materials and to give shared access to selected people to chosen uploaded photo’s. I use Dropbox to share stuff between the family. And finally I use a Synology NAS which gives us an in-house Cloud Station (running on 2x2Tb green disks in Raid 1 mode) so we are independent of anyone else’s hardware and even the internet – though I would miss it.
As to why, it is because it took two years (spare time) digitising just some of my slides and negatives and together with the digital photos they amount to several tens of GB. So I store them on two separate disks within the computer and on a USB disk kept in a fire safe (and a DVD copy too). And they are backed up to the NAS and available via the Synology DLNA server so we can view them in comfort on the TV. Its probably overkill but it was fun working it out.

If you really are worried about online security, go for a TNO (Trust No One) architecture. You specify a security key, and only the person who enters that key can unlock it. I’ve been using Carbonite for my online backups for several years. The annual cost is roughly £40, which gives you unlimited space. Only I can access my data using my password as it is not stored anywhere. Without the password, the cloud data is just noise.

The problem is that you lose functionality doing this. The easy thing about skydrive, google drive, dropbox, etc is that you can access them much more easily from within your OS. As they store your password, in theory they can be hacked or coerced into sharing it, so your data is theoretically less secure. So you trade off security for functionality. I use these for sharing files with others – dropbox for my family and skydrive for running a club – stuff I’d share anyway.

I also backup daily to my PC and weekly to DVD. It takes no effort once the backup plan is in place (apart from changing the DVD every week!), but it gives extra peace of mind. You have to think what would happen if I lost all my files – photos, emails, critical documents.

The cloud has made my life so much simpler. I recently discovered a service called Grepolis – a great big filing cabinet-c*m-notebook in the sky. I can scan important documents to it – invoices, insurances, bank statements, contracts, passport details & co, take screen clippings from any webpage through a Grepo button added to my browser, compile a shopping list as I run out of things in the kitchen, keep favourite recipes and have all these notes immediately synched between my PC, laptop, tablet and smartphone. I shop with my mobile clipped to the Waitrose trolley (using the handy checkboxes to tick off items as they go in the basket), rifle through photos and press cuttings when writing a magazine article, and when I want to check what my water rates are I can do a simple search for ‘water’ in my money notebook to bring up the latest payments that went through my bank account. (You can do global searches of your files, search notebooks within those or individual notes.) I can import spreadsheets, word processed files and databases and store them as individual notes with tags.

I can add up to 60Mb a month of stuff for free without any limit on the sum total of my account. (There are premium accounts for people who need to add more in a short period.)

It has simply been life changing.

Forgive the asterisks above. I tried to type the Latin for ‘with’!!!

“Grepolis – The browser game set in Antiquity”

??

Michael are you sure you have the right name?