Am I too old? I only trust hard saving to offline storage. Be that an external hdd or a flash drive.
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.
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.
Yeah this is the answer.
This old school idea of “keep it on a drive” misses the fact that you can lose it, forget it, it can break, hardware can fail, etc.
If you have your book on a flash drive and it breaks, good luck. I have my stuff on 3 different services encrypted. I can literally get my info from anywhere at any time.
Especially trusting cloud storage without a local backup for psyche-critical work - absolutely bonkers
I always get told that they would never take your stuff away, even though there are lots of examples.
Yes we’re too experienced and sceptical.
Yeah, for me cloud storage is one of many backups, but it’s just that, a backup. It should never be the original or only. It’s there in case your PC shits the bed, not as your prime storage.
Actually many people use cloud as the original. I don’t get why we are pretending this isn’t normal.
Because it’s wrong. If you don’t have physical access to your files, you don’t have a backup. Someone else does, but you do not. It’s like saying “I own a Lamborghini” when it’s parked in a garage across the country that you’re not allowed to enter and the only way you can see it is by them sending a picture. Sure, your name is on the title, but is it really yours if you can only access it at the behest of someone else?
Nevermind the fact that a backup isn’t just for data loss. It’s also for network loss. No Internet means no cloud. What good is a PC if it can only do work while online?
But hey, nothing has ever disappeared from the internet, right? Hold that thought while I pull up my old photos from MySpace…
You are not too old. I feel the exact same way. Anything worth keeping should be saved locally. Plus storage today is so cheap, there really is no excuse to save exclusively on the cloud.
Yes. No one ever listened except the other nerds from our generation. Everyone else was to old to understand at the time and the rest just jumped in because they learned it in preschool.
I don’t trust having only local files. Ideally you should have multiple local copies with at least one cloud storage and encrypt everything before you upload, so unless your house catches on fire and your cloud storage also fucks you over at the same time, then you are protected against both risks if they happen as separate incidents.
Also maybe go somewhere in the woods and hide a box of encrypted hard drives there, just to be extra safe. So three backups. Your house, A box buried in the woods, and cloud storage.
No, you aren’t. I only use it because my work makes me to be able to share with everyone in the district.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, same here - I do all my show scripts in Markdown. My editor of choice is IntelliJ. For any non-technical writers here, IntelliJ is like what Scrivener wants to be when it grows up.
I have tried lots of text editors, tons. None of them quite do what I want. I installed CudaText. It’s now my favorite. I love it so much. The settings… Oh, the delicious settings…
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.
guess we just need to wiggle a sheet of paper with a list of book and movie titles to scare googie
It should not matter at all what he wrote. This is absolutely the wrong question to focus on.
True, it should not matter, but it did. Because of that, it’s perfectly valid to ask what it was and why it triggered the automated security response.
My partner wrote a couple of hardboiled PI novels about shady people doing shady shit.
Lawrence of Arabia?
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.
a bit harsh, but often the most important lessons in life are those that hurt the most.
I was training students for a deadline driven technical field. They needed to know that when deadline day comes, it’s not “oopsie doopsy” my dog ate my homework, it’s you are now out of business, everybody you work alongside is jobless, you are bankrupt, get your resume going and good luck dude.
Using cloud services as the only copy is literally what I have been told to do working on my PhD by my supervisors. This is in the cybersecurity department. How you think this attitude is acceptable or normal is beyond me.
The whole point of modern cloud platforms is they worry about this so you don’t have to. Not that people ever actually followed 321 backup policy anyway.
Edit: at least my stuff is on two different cloud services.
I’m sure this was reasonable 10 years ago, when Google didn’t have a policy of erasing people’s files without reason.
I am not talking about Google but rather Overleaf and GitHub. Though there is university data kept on Google Drive including students marks.
If you are using GitHub, then the cloud copy is obviously not the only copy.
Your supervisors are wrong. How they think that attitude is acceptable or normal is beyond me.
This is the policy of most colleges these days. The school will provide a service to do that but it’s up to the student to ensure their work is backed up. Granted most schools only offer OneDrive but still, you’re told ahead of time.
reads like an ad for that service they plugged
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.
This is also why we’re screaming about Windows and it’s integrated AI that can scan your drive. What Google is doing here Windows could do in the future with your local files. “That’s a nice collection of 2000s MP3s you have aaaand it’s gone.”
“That’s a nice program you have there but the creator has revoked the licensing. So we disabled it until you update your license”
And even then, if you make sure to copy the actual file, you’d still depend on them to open it if it’s in their proprietary format.
I just realized the other day that one of the updates on my Chromebook automatically installed something called “NotebookLM” on my app bar. Never asked for it. Never even looked at apps on my Chromebook before. But it’s there now, and it super secret bloodswap pinky swares it won’t steal my ideas or writing. What an odd thing to say on first open.
Be careful who you trust with your data! And back it up
That’s a long way to go for an ad. Good read though.
Mind spoiling it for me?
I’m fully expecting them to straight up delete something… And then release it as theirs any day now
What a clusterfuck.
There was a cool browser extension back in the days that changed the word “cloud” to “someone else’s computer” in the articles on the internet. It changes perspective and eliminates a lot of headache this way.
This reframing can be super useful in getting corporate types to understand that storing stuff in the cloud isn’t a magic solution, and that it comes with its own problems (especially in terms of data governance stuff).
Even on weather articles?
Especially on the weather articles. Heavy someone else’s computers with the good chance of rain.
You can download stuff off your Google account here. Select what you want, not all or it might fail. Choose format, and wait for the email.
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.
I don’t think they can nuke files from my linux computer.
Is your CPU open source? I bet you have a Intel ME or AMD PSP on your computer.
Yes, but how are they going to wipe my offline backups?
if a government or corporation or whoever is seeking to delete your personal files specifically, i think you have much bigger problems to worry about
A government isn’t going to care about your files outside of using them as evidence against you.
Under normal circumstances, they can’t. But if they actually want to target you and they want to spend the time and resources, they could potentially send instructions to the backdoor to secretly sabotage the backup process:
Basically showing you that the backup is working, while in the background, it has been encrypting the files to a key they control during that backup process, and essentialy act as ransomware. (Modern computing has made hardware encryption so fast that it would be seamless, so it would be hard to notice that happening.)
So every time you check the backup’s integrity, it uses the key to unlock the files and show you “everything is fine”.
But when the time comes, they would nuke the keys from the Intel ME / AMD PSP then next time you try to access your files, you get an error message, then you try to plug in the backup drive, also shows errors. Because they already nuked the keys, you have a bunch of encrypted data you can’t access.
Sounds far fetched, but theoretically its possible.
They would just as well nuke me litetally if we are that far down
Alternately, if you don’t live in China, Zhaoxin makes x86-64-compatible CPUs. No need to worry about the Chinese government/corpos helping the American government/corpos tyrannize it’s own citizens.
They’re not quite as good as intel/AMD in perf or effeciency/dollar.
The cloud is only part of 321
