I thought the whole point of cloud storage was to avoid the need for backups and local storage. That’s how Apple justifies their 256GB starter laptops and 64GB iPads.
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Some Google Drive Users' Files Have Mysteriously Vanished
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think that's my plan going forward. Although instead of a NAS I have x2 Lacie 2 bigs which is a bit manual but I had a bad experience with Apple time capsule its put me off NAS. I know they are quicker today but I've been scarred for life ha..
yep, I think we should all be using larger internal drives as cloud is just too risky.. I am a fan of photos app on Mac which I do download locally and use cloud to sync to my phone. but technically if apple lost my photos it would then sync and remove them from Mac that's downloaded them locally wouldn't it?
Reminds me of the fact that the first version of Google was literally a PC sitting under someone’s desk.
And that for many years they touted the fact that their data center was a bunch of Linux PCs and people walking around with carts of spare parts.
Maybe they haven’t come so far after all.
Further confirming my sense that the way to go these days is with software / services / companies that focus on doing one thing and doing it well. For Apple and Google both, cloud storage is a line item among thousands of others.
I assume you mean using something like Dropbox or Box for storage, Fastmail for email, etc. That is not very cost effective, unfortunately, as they tend to focus more on corporate accounts. If Apple, Google, Microsoft can't provide reliable service, they should stop charging for it.
"either/or"? Where did I say that? I use cloud, but also sync to multiple devices. Just exactly as you stated.
If only everyone could afford $2000 for your setup and the knowledge to do it. I think for most people, using cloud storage offers greater functionality and data loss is very rare. Keep your data synced local or backed up somewhere. Simple. Cloud services aren't going away. Because there is an occasional data loss doesn't make the platform untrustworthy. If that were the case, I guess you shouldn't have ever used hard drives because, well, they crash (and way more frequently than cloud services lose data). Backup your data and use what works for you. For me, I use my 1TB OneDrive that is included in my M365 and also fully sync to my Windows desktop and a Mac Mini. I have top performance to that data and also the flexibility to access what I need to when away or from my mobile devices.
That's corporate speech for damage control.
I think my frustration is that google & apple in particular push the cloud as the solution for back ups and smaller SSD's when in fact they are more like sync services. I know it's rare for them to fail but the above does prove it can happen.
I have never seen Apple push iCloud for backups except for iPhones and iPads. Never for Macs.
If you read Apple website about iCloud it's about storing documents, photos and files and sharing them between devices or other people.
Here is Apple's guide to iCloud Drive:
Store files in iCloud Drive on Mac
On your Mac, use iCloud Drive to store files and folders so you can easily access them from any device and online.
support.apple.com
Doesn't sound like a backup solution at all.
If you use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for work, you can back these up to Active Backup on Synology NAS systems: https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/active_backup_google_workspace.
No, what I said was that people should maintain proper backups. Do whatever you like, but know that syncing to multiple devices is not the same thing as making a dedicated backup. In a scenario where a service went down or files got corrupted or you got locked out of your account, you'd be ****ed if you only had access to whatever happened to have synced on your other devices. Oh, and are you using "optimized storage"? Because if so, those machines your syncing to may contain lots of little placeholder files which are meaningless without access to the company's server you keep them on.
Again, I don't care what you do, but for others reading this, a proper backup accounts for scenarios like this by saving separate versions of everything at regular intervals. At any given point -- even if the cloud service totally fails -- you have a saved copy of everything.
For my part, I own about 4 TB of data including everything. Much of that is synced via iCloud Drive, but it's also backed up in its entirety to two hard drives, one of which is at work and one is at home. Paranoid? Maybe. But I've also been accumulating stuff for decades, and a lot of it is really important. I'm sure as hell not going to leave it all only on a server belonging to Apple or Dropbox or Google. I can know with certainty that I own and control my own copies of my data.
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What's this, then?
Ways to back up or protect your files
Back up your files using Time Machine, store them in iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos, burn them to CDs or DVDs, or copy them to another disk.
support.apple.com
Definitely damage control language. "Limited number of people" is always technically true, since only a certain number of people actually use said service. So basically this says nothing, which is classic.
The other useless statement they LOVE to trot out is "we take our customers data integrity very seriously."
Try accidentally modifying the wrong file, or deleting something, or having a file get corrupted. Let us all know how your file recovery goes if you get locked out of iCloud or someone hacks your account (and yes, this can happen).
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Shout out google for giving free advertising to QNAP, synology, nextcloud and owncloud. It's a good thing we all religiously apply the 3-2-1 rule.
"The 3-2-1 backup strategy simply states that you should have 3 copies of your data (your production data and 2 backup copies) on two different media (disk and tape) with one copy off-site for disaster recovery."
"The 3-2-1 backup strategy simply states that you should have 3 copies of your data (your production data and 2 backup copies) on two different media (disk and tape) with one copy off-site for disaster recovery."
Don’t know about iCloud but Dropbox allows access to old versions and deleted files. As far as getting hacked/locked out, that’s a different problem. FWIW I don’t depend on cloud storage for backup.
Interesting. We currently use:
- iCloud (2TB): primarily to ensure apps/photos backed up, but also contains some files from macOS/iPad/iOS
- google (200MB): primarily for gmail & photo backup (#2 to icloud)
- onedrive (6x1TB): random documents, other stuff, large files
- local drives (4TB on pi, ~12GB, decommissioning on 10yr old pc): admittedly occasional backup
In our family we were in the process of evaluating moving away from onedrive and consolidating more in google (icloud just didn't have the usability/reliability). As it happens moving was a hassle, pushback from the users (!). I had issues with the onedrive client on macOS, though it was definitely better than Box! (work)
So in the apple ecosystem, anyone prefer Onedrive over google? They seem much of a muchness.... I think MS has a bit more skin in the game though (you can see that with Edge, which is getting rather good). google tends to forget about their old apps and development dries up.
- iCloud (2TB): primarily to ensure apps/photos backed up, but also contains some files from macOS/iPad/iOS
- google (200MB): primarily for gmail & photo backup (#2 to icloud)
- onedrive (6x1TB): random documents, other stuff, large files
- local drives (4TB on pi, ~12GB, decommissioning on 10yr old pc): admittedly occasional backup
In our family we were in the process of evaluating moving away from onedrive and consolidating more in google (icloud just didn't have the usability/reliability). As it happens moving was a hassle, pushback from the users (!). I had issues with the onedrive client on macOS, though it was definitely better than Box! (work)
So in the apple ecosystem, anyone prefer Onedrive over google? They seem much of a muchness.... I think MS has a bit more skin in the game though (you can see that with Edge, which is getting rather good). google tends to forget about their old apps and development dries up.
Dropbox gives you version recovery from 1-12 months, depending on what plan you have. iCloud Drive gives you 30 days and I don't think it's as granular as Dropbox. Google Drive does versioning too, but I'm not certain how far back it goes. Also Google's habit of killing features and products doesn't exactly inspire confidence long-term
I think cloud storage is an excellent supplement to proper backups, but I myself feel a lot more comfortable accounting for a worst-case scenario where I'm recovering everything with the data I physically control.
I think it's worth beating the drum here a bit because so many people just think "it's on the cloud so I'm covered" without considering the ramifications of handing total control over to some company's servers and policies.
At my workplace (small design firm, all working on Macs) we have moved our active projects into Google Drive and are having pretty good luck with it. It seems to sync changes fast and with a lot of transparency as to what is getting synced. I've noticed a little lagginess with the UI when you go to save a file, but haven't tracked it down yet.
Unlike the horrible Adobe Creative Cloud file syncing service we were using, the Mac Google Drive client also allows selective sync so you can pick what files and folders are "pinned" and saved locally. iCloud Drive is also quite bad about this, and will just randomly purge local caches with no user control over the process (unless you have enough local storage to keep everything downloaded).
On the personal end, my family is all in on iCloud, though, just because of how thoroughly integrated it is with the OSes. My user base (wife) is quite indifferent so long as she can use the file she needs when she needs it. Honestly I'm not even sure she's aware of what's happening behind the scenes, which is actually fine.
I had to check really quick, but it looks like my vast collection of cat memes in the cloud is still safe and untouched