quote:

Originally posted by Aeteocles:

quote:

Originally posted by LBTRS:

I hear ya but it's encrypted and both the cloud services are secured with 2FA so I'm confident things are secure. At least secure enough for my needs.

If anyone wants to take my before and after fat pics they can have them.

Last week (or earlier this week) Canon's photo hosting service was attacked by ransomware. Users irrecoverably lost photo data.

If a Google or AWS server gets attacked by ransomware, be prepared to lose data. Best case scenario, there's a backup version buried far enough back that they can restore to, but there's a strong chance that the malware has been dormantly sitting on the system for weeks or months, and they'll nuke and pave everything going back as far as they need.

Cloud based backup has its place. But I would never rely on it.

Also, recall someone's son here lost access to his Google account because of a biffed Two-Factor Authentication issue. All of that encryption and security can work against you if you lose the device with 2FA or an angry spouse/hacker/child locks you out.

quote:

Originally posted by architect:
When thinking about backup, don't forget to consider recovery. Think about what you will have to do to get your system back in the state it was before the disaster happened. For example, system drive failure. If you are backed up "to the cloud" you will have considerable work to do before you will be able to restore from the cloud, fix the hardware, install OS, configure networking, etc.

I have decades of backups for some clients on DAT and DLT tapes as well as obsolete optical media, and one of those clients regularly demands restoration of individual files that are thirty or forty years gone. I have to maintain machines that can read multiple obsolete media formats in the absence of current operating system support for the needed hardware.

Virtualization has made the burden of retaining old OS's much lighter, but it doesn't help when the only drive controller extant is a Multibus card that the manufacturer stopped supporting in 1985, and back then only had drivers for SunOS anyway.

Imagine that you have valuable backups on floppy disks - 8" floppy disks. What will you do? Even if you can get the hardware together to access the media, you still have to remember how to run the software to get at it, so you better archive the manuals, release notes, etc. in paper form because you won't be able to read these electronically either.

I am aware that the typical home user never has to deal with these issues, but eventually, as technology advances, they will. USB-connected flash and disk media seem like they will persist for a while, but you still have the issue with on-drive partitioning and formatting changes. Oh boy, I have my Synology NAS all genned up with a beautiful 8-way ZFS RAIDZ3 array, the NAS's SAS controller blows up, how do you move this array to a new machine and retain the data? Hint: don't swap disk 0 and disk 3 when plugging things back up.

quote:

Originally posted by LBTRS:
Solve all your problems in they were on the cloud.

quote:

Originally posted by Aeteocles:

quote:

Originally posted by LBTRS:

I hear ya but it's encrypted and both the cloud services are secured with 2FA so I'm confident things are secure. At least secure enough for my needs.

......
Users irrecoverably lost photo data.

If a Google or AWS server gets attacked by ransomware, be prepared to lose data. Best case scenario, there's a backup version buried far enough back that they can restore to, but there's a strong chance that the malware has been dormantly sitting on the system for weeks or months, and they'll nuke and pave everything going back as far as they need.

Cloud based backup has its place. But I would never rely on it.