Chose cloud storage over external drives and now I'm not sure

I finally decided to move everything off my two old 2TB hard drives into Google Drive. It took me a whole weekend organizing files from 2016 to now, and I paid for 200GB a month. But now my internet goes out and I can't access half my stuff. Anyone else regret going all in on the cloud?

2 comments

2 Comments

charles7209d ago

Man that's rough, I did the exact same thing about a year ago. Moved everything off three old USB drives into Dropbox because I was tired of the cables and clutter. Thought it was genius until my neighborhood had a fiber cut that took out internet for like 4 days. Couldn't even pull up basic photos or documents I needed for a work thing. Had to borrow a neighbor's hotspot just to download a file. Now I keep a copy of all my important stuff on a little 500GB portable SSD I got on sale. Cloud is great for convenience but it's not a backup if you can't get to it when the net goes down.

emma_wells839d ago

Oh, careful now. I think you're mixing up "backup" with "sync" there. Dropbox and those services are really just syncing your files across devices, not keeping a separate copy for you. If your computer crashes and wipes out the local folder, Dropbox might also lose those files depending on the timing. A proper backup is something like Backblaze or an external hard drive that keeps a version history you can go back to. You're right that cloud is still great for access, but it's not a true safety net on its own.