Yeah, about that ‘cheep’ cloud storage…
Yeah, maybe tossing all of the physical media and using the cloud to store your memories wasn’t the best move?
Especially if you’ve got 70 years of archival footage that could disappear at the drop of a hat, as this St. Louis PBS station has learned.
They stored 50 terabytes of data with a cloud storage company, that company went kaput, and now they’re having to fight tooth and nail to get that data back.
Full article, HERE at Not the Bee. h/t Stretch
We’ve had a lot of conversations about ‘cloud’ storage here. In reality it is nothing more than somebody else’s computer that you’re storing stuff on.
And how good is that ‘security’, or is there any? I know these places ‘claim’ there is airtight security (yeah, right), but how much stuff has been hacked in the last 10 years?
How many ‘actors’ have had those ‘private’ nudes hacked? How many companies have had business plans hacked? How many companies have their entire proprietary dataset hacked? How many hospitals (remember that whole HIPAA thing)?
How do you know who really has access to your private data? Some bored tech somewhere scanning your data for any .jpgs, or???
In the early 2000s, I watched a group of white hat hackers hack a windoze network in less than five minutes from start to root access on a system they had NO access to. Sigh… And that was 20+ years ago.
And lets not forget the Google debacle, where they said ‘anything’ you put on a Google drive belonged to them, copywrite or not…
Personally, I never have, and never will use or trust the cloud. I prefer physical media that I control. I use terabyte hard drives for both backup, and ‘spare’ storage, in addition to dumping my critical stuff to thumb drives, one of which is kept off site.
What y’all do is up to y’all, but you should be aware of the possible issues. Just sayin…
There’s a good vignette in Rollerball (James Caan) where he goes to the library and asks where all the books are. The librarian tells him that everything has been digitized. The library has lost the entire history of the 13th century, and the computer refuses/can’t find what our hero is looking for. Rather prescient for the early 70s.
I do exactly what you do — nothing is placed voluntarily on the cloud. Which is not to say that there are some programs that don’t put things on the cloud without your being aware of it… I store and backup everything locally — two old USAF high security fireproof safes for containers — but that’s to protect me. I assume that everything I put on my computer or look at or whatever is compromised in some way, though.
yep.
There are two kinds of data:
1: Backed up off site in two different locations
2. Lost.
Looks at 2 USB 1TB external drives, one a monthly backup, the other twice a day. They came in handy when we had to evacuate for the S. Oregon fire and it was 50-50 if we’d have a house to come back to. [We did, and are slowly getting defrazzeled.]
50TB worth of USB drives. Less than $5000 and a bunch of busywork for an intern…
(I’m a long retired techie. I don’t trust clod, er “cloud” storage.)
And yeah, that doesn’t have redundancy, but mass buys of large drives would drive the cost of duplicates down a lot.
‘Cloud Data Storage’ is just a nice sounding name for ‘Someone else has your data, not you’.
50 Terabytes?? Ohhh…. ahhh…. You mean ten $200 dollar SSD’s from Amazon? Oh, I know! It was the extra grand to build the storage and access box, right?
Too much of ‘cloud storage’ just doesn’t add up past “Hand off the job so I don’t have to do it”.
Another minor item — I trust disc hard drives, not SSDs. If you do use SSDs, be sure to power them up from time to time.
All good points. As I may have remarked here before, when asked if I have my data backed up, I reply, “Yes, and I can read it with a candle”.
Another vignette from back in the day. Perhaps you recall the term “war driving”. Purely on the up and up, a security IT outfit would discover unsecured net works, then politely inform the owners and offer their tech services. Most common response? “Yes, we know, and if you breath a word to anyone, we will sue you”.
Storage?=
32TB ssd portable for $48, or $65 for 3!
https://usbest1.com/products/16075014289626958844931170?
Not many left, they claim.
That’s a well known scam. There is NO way you can get 32 Terrabytes of storage for a ridiculously low price like that, not ever, and especially not with Ramageddon prices happening.
They put a 16 or 32 gigabyte memory module from a USB stick in, and modify it to overwrite itself when you go beyond the 32 gb limit so it LOOKS like it’s writing, but when you go to get the file back, it’s corrupted.
See a similar example here where a “32 TB” drive was actually a 96 GB SD card:
https://tinyurl.com/28e7cj32
(goes to ‘pentestpartners.com’)
Also this link to “Trust Pilot” which contains customers’ reviews of usbest1.com. It ain’t pretty.
https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/usbest1.com
50TB minor storage today, folks like Wasabi will store that data for under $5,000 per year and they are well known and well capitalized. That and a business grade NAS from folks like Synology can store that data nearly forever, they just needed slow archive access not fast edit-grade access.
The station went with a local and minority-owed storage provider to meet DEI goals and got burned.
I have cloud storage as part of another service I use (Protonmail). I pay for it, it’s not free. When you use free “services” the service isn’t the product they’re selling, you are.
Anyway, I only use the cloud “storage” service as a transfer medium. When I need to get a file from one computer to another or send it to a friend and it’s too big to email, I put it on the cloud storage service and share it so they can get to it and then delete it immediately after the transfer is complete. That’s the only use for it that I have.
For long term storage of things, here’s my solution: I never throw away a hard drive unless it quits or is so old, slow and small that it’s outlived its usefulness. If I buy a new computer, I strip the hard drive out of the old one and put it in an external enclosure. I have a couple of 1-terabyte hard drives in enclosures right now that I use as working data drives and a few smaller ones that I use for temporary storage.
I have one really big one (a 6Tb that came out of a security camera DVR that died) I have connected to a router (behind a firewall) as a network drive. I won’t go into details about my network setup, but I have one desktop computer that’s always running. On it, I use a backup program to copy the data drives from all the other computers connected to my network to a mirror folder on the 6Tb drive.
It’s an incremental backup so although the initial run took forever, it only updates the backup to record changes to the data drives from the last time and runs very quickly. I execute it at 3am every day and it’s typically finished in less than 10 minutes…sometimes 20 if I’ve saved some big files or uploaded a batch of pictures.
That way if one of my data drives dies, I still have the backup. If the backup drive dies, I still have the originals and can just re-establish the backup on a new drive.
I used to burn things like photos and videos to DVD-R media, but the fact is, recordable disk media degrades over time, so that’s not guaranteed, plus with the increase in resolution of photos and videos over the past years, the files have become too big for that to be practical. I find this the solution that gives me the best peace of mind that I won’t lose data except in some weird coincidence that both the backup drive and one or more of the data drives fail at the same time (or a tornado destroys everything in my house).
The only thing that would be safer (in terms of storage redundancy) would be an offsite backup, but that has it’s own risks and complications so, for what I need, I find this set up works well.
If you don’t have a single large hard drive laying around, several smaller ones will do, or you can just buy a big external hard drive…Amazon has 6-8Tb drives for a bit over $200 right now.
If you set it up to run automatically every night, you don’t have to remember to run backups and risk losing data if you forget for a while.
I hope I’m not coming across as a “know it all” or something, just sharing what I’ve found works for me in case someone else finds it useful.
BTW, I don’t run a business or anything, my storage needs are limited to pictures of my dogs and grandkids, a few videos of the kids birthday parties and baseball games and the documents I generate and use (reloading data, home project plans, digital copies of legal and tax documents, things like that). 6Tb is plenty for what I’m storing. In fact I only actually use about half that drive. I can’t even imagine how many pictures or videos someone would have to have to need 50Tb of storage.
Video archives eat a ton of capacity, at 4K resolution you are eating storage at about 11GB/hour, so 50TB is something over 4,000 hours of programming.
As far as I know, I don’t use “the cloud”. Occasionally I will donwlaod files on a thumb drive. I use aura to try keping my personal information off the web and they do a good job for the most part.
My cell phone is what I worry about. I have never accessed any bank information on it and rarely open any email.
All- Thanks for the responses, and no Curt, you’re not being a show off, you’re just smart! 🙂 What y’all have said reminds me I need to go pull a couple of HDs I have in stored computers… sigh…