Am I too old? I only trust hard saving to offline storage. Be that an external hdd or a flash drive.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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people just never learn that companies cannot be trusted...time and time again, they work to steal and claim ownership of your intelligence.
people don't need to learn that. these things need to be regulated. also Google needs to be broken up to like 12 pieces or nationalized. what needs to happen is companies not have this much power ever.
what needs to happen is companies not have this much power ever.
There is zero chance that we can get the oligarchy to surrender power peacefully, so that's not going to happen unless…
^For^ ^legal^ ^purposes^ ^this^ ^comment^ ^is^ ^a^ ^joke^
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Famously Americans did the splitting thing once before with Standard Oil and it was immensely beneficial to the economy in general. Just checked the wiki and it was more than 100 years ago. Unlikely the same laws are still on the books.
There are several companies currently active that deserve the same treatment.
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I'm in university (as an old) and just about everyone from faculty to staff has been pushing me to put everything in OneDrive. I know better, but young people tend to trust that an educational institution is looking out for them.
My freshman year I met teenagers who didn't know what a flash drive is. Most of them have iPads with no storage, one of my classmates was just uploading all her lectures directly to YouTube so she could review them later.
There's nothing wrong with putting everything in OneDrive... as long as you also have it somewhere else.
At work we're told to put everything into OneDrive and we're blocked from using USB drives, or using any other online storage. Fortunately all of the data I use and create on my work computer belongs to my employer, so if they only trust MS with their data then who am I to argue?
Businesses are classic chumps for the Microsoft scam. It's why Microsoft will stop producing new products and just live off the Office suite for another 100 years, easy.
Yeah, I understand why employers use it. Oddly, I used to work for Microsoft and can't remember using OneDrive for our projects lol
But as a student I really prefer saving stuff locally and to a separate storage device. The university system has been hacked at least once since I've been a student, we all lost our credentials and were required to physically go to the campus to reset them. The university also revokes access three years after graduation.
Oddly, I used to work for Microsoft and can't remember using OneDrive for our projects lol
They knew better than to get high off their own supply
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You don't need to trust to use cloud services, I copy encrypted backups into the cloud. The only risk is that they don't give it back but that's why you have multiple backups.
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Especially trusting cloud storage without a local backup for psyche-critical work - absolutely bonkers
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The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust cloud companies.
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust companies.
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust.
And there are people who think you're joking, reductio ad absurdum.
You can't trust your own computer, because the hard drive might go bad at any moment, so you backup up a USB drive. But you can't trust that backup, because your house could burn down, or get flooded, or get caught in a tornado; so you back up to cloud, too. But you can't trust that because, well, cloud.
At some point, you just have to accept that there will always be risk, no matter what you do. You take steps to minimize it until your comfort level exceeds the cost or PITA-ness of your backup solutions, but those who know, know you can never guarantee you've covered all the bases.
Don't trust, indeed.
The extra word is not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t.
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It’s worth noting that Google is 100x worse than the baseline level of sucking when it comes to randomly deleting your account with no recourse.
Cloud can be a backup, it absolutely should never be your only copy.
But keep in mind they will probably use that data for anything they want, like training AI models. So make sure you are ok with them doing that on any data you put there. This is mostly why I fill my cloud space with incoherent nonsense.
If you want to back up anything important on someone else's server (cloud), put it all into an encrypted blob. It's not a bad idea to use them to put a copy of your files in a different physical location, but also don't trust them any further than necessary.
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Always, always backup. And frequently! Don't trust your local harddrive (especially if it's a device you frequently take with you), don't trust flashdrives, don't even trust your local fileserver if it doesn't have built-in backups (and even if it does, check that those backups actually work). If it's not saved on at least two physical places (two drives in the same PC/server count, but it's sketchy on its own), it's not backed up!
3-2-1 Backup: 3 copies, on 2 types of media, 1 of which is offsite.
I just scatter mine under the fingernails of multiple unhoused individuals throughout the city. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s peace of mind. I’m thinking of expanding into microfiche hidden in fortune cookies next.
I convert all my files to wavforms and teach starlings the songs
Hard to take the photo of it, but I backed up your comment to a CD:
Software used: https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage
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Ah yes, the very first lesson I'd teach in my multimedia 'authoring' class: Back your shit up, here's 11 ways to do that; if you EVER tell me you lost your work as an excuse I'm going to LAUGH IN YOUR FACE as I assign you a ZERO.
I never really liked Google, but their whole thing was supposed to be that you never needed to worry about backups.
But as Google so often does, they've decided to screw people over who relied on their drive and office suite.
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This is extra bad because they want you to use cloud files in gdrive (I can't remember what the feature is actually called), which doesn't save the content locally on your computer, but puts an icon that will download the content from Google servers when you click on it. This means you have no local backup of your data in your computer backups.
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In the process of degoogling my life. Email and files are gone, but I use GMaps, still.
Google (still) offers a regular backup of your data to download. You can set it up to run at intervals and just download the entire thing. Includes file (and photos), email, messages, etc. It's great for products you forget you were using, and great for an offline backup.
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I have TWO USB backups.
My brother fucked one up for his Windows XP obsession. Which would be funny, if it were not dangerous.
Justified obsession tbh.
The only time in my life I've seriously considered suicide was when I lost the usb drive that had all my novel notes on it. If a major company ripped everything from me because "reasons", I'd be considering homicide instead.
By the way, git is good for more than just software. I keep my novel notes in a git repository these days.
I do my writing in markdown. Keeps me from being distracted over formatting. Easily converted to HTML/EPUB for review and editing. git + plaintext + pandoc is a dream.
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The fuck was this dude watching/writing down for google to think it was related to terrorism or trafficking????
They probably assumed it was a piracy list. To them, piracy is terrorism and trafficking.
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What a clusterfuck.
Is local storage even safe from big corp just remotely nuking your files? I'm sure there's a secret button somewhere to mass delete photos from people's phones incase they start rolling in the tanks to crush a protest.
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Cloud drives are a handy form of secondary backup, IF you secure the contents with a tool like Cryptomator. I backup my content to a local NAS which one-way syncs nightly to an external drive attached to Raspberry Pi at my office and a cryptomator Dropbox, that in turn one way syncs to cryptomator Google Drive. I also manually encrypt and upload important documents to Proton Drive and Mega as cold storage.
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