Copy is shutting down

[latepaul]

Most of modern* life requires reliance on others in some form or other. I don't grow my own food or make my own clothes. My plumbing and sewerage need to be connected to larger systems to work. My heating requires either gas or electricity to be supplied to my house. I own a car but I don't maintain the roads I drive on. My money is the form an entry in a bank's ledger. Even my cash only has value because of a system I am only a tiny tiny part of. I didn't build this PC (much less mine/extract/refine the materials needed).

Obviously I could go on.

My point is not to get this thread dragged into P&R territory, my point is that we rely on systems, institutions and people who could let us down all the time. And we do it because in most cases these other entities are better at doing whatever it is than we'd be on our own - otherwise I'd be wearing a sack as a smock and eating nettle soup or some such.

So by all means avoid using cloud services if you prefer to but don't think it's any more risky for those of us that do use them than say posting a letter and expecting it to get to its destination. Which is to say it works well enough most of the time and you can mitigate the risks somewhat (but not entirely).


(*i.e. post industrial revolution)

[Katsunami]

Obviously, but the chance that one of the services you mention goes down is a lot smaller. If a service goes down, it's doable to switch to something else, without too many ill effects; maybe some discomfort. If a cloud service goes down and you relied on it as your only place of storage, you'll lose all your data instantly.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If a cloud service goes down and you relied on it as your only place of storage, you'll lose all your data instantly.

Anyone who relies on any device or service as their sole means of data storage is acting unwisely.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Anyone who relies on any device or service as their sole means of data storage is acting unwisely.

I wouldn't be surprised if you just named around 90% of the computer-using population. Nobody I know ever creates backups, not even after I saved their @$$ on more than one occasion. (OS crapped out/damaged, so the saving was done by starting a Linux Live CD and copying stuff.)

"If your hard disk breaks down, I can't even do this anymore, and you'll lose everything," I tell them.

Then they buy an external hard drive, put everything on it, and in the end, the bacckup, when needed, is three years old.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I wouldn't be surprised if you just named around 90% of the computer-using population.

Yep. Perhaps even more. I learnt the hard way, many years ago, after a "grinding metal" disk crash. Now I make daily backups of my important stuff onto an external drive, and a weekly mirror of that external drive onto a second one.

My eBook and music libraries are the most valuable things I own, with the exception of my house. I want to make damned sure they're multiply backed-up.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Yep. Perhaps even more. I learnt the hard way, many years ago, after a "grinding metal" disk crash.

Same here: in 1995, two days before having to turn in a big paper for school, my 486's hard disk died.

* start *
* krrr. kding. krrr. kding. krrr. kding. *
* error *

Crap...

Fortunately I did have a printout made a few days before. I never typed so fast for so long (on a loaner laptop).

That cost a pretty penny to replace, as I was still a teenager.

My eBook and music libraries are the most valuable things I own, with the exception of my house. I want to make damned sure they're multiply backed-up.

If counted in monetary value only, then I have stuff that is worth much more; my current laptop, the organ, and maybe even the piano.

If I also count the time needed to organize and fix them the way I want them, then they're easily worth more than all of my other stuff thrown together.

[gabby98]

Originally Posted by HarryT

.... I learnt the hard way, many years ago, after a "grinding metal" disk crash. Now I make daily backups of my important stuff onto an external drive, and a weekly mirror of that external drive onto a second one....

I hear ya...I am not a frequest as you, but I learned a few years ago when I'd made space on my computer by moving some files to an external then the next day when I went to backup the external to DVD Discs, too broke at the time for two externals, all I heard was the grind. I've been in denial so much so that I refuse to dump the drive, like miraculously some day I'll get all the family pics of my nephew at 6 months old back not to mention a good chunk of my digital media

[Cinisajoy]

Pictures are backed up on 3 computers and at least 2 memory cards. Amazon books are not backed up. Other ebooks are in at least 2 places. Music is on one computer and one memory card.
A few things are in Dropbox or Google Drive.

[Conan46]

I use cloud storage mostly to back things up. My neighbor's house burned down a few years ago, and a family friend lost her house to fire last year. Unless someone has an off-site storage facility, an extra hard drive in your house is no guarantee of preserving things.
It is a shame to see these cloud storage services going under. Already Ubuntu One went down, now Copy, and I expect a few other smaller services to go. Dropbox may do well. Box seems to be getting lots of business storage, so I'm hopeful for them.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos...ion-footsteps-
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft seems the most solid out of them all for cloud storage.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by latepaul

Most of modern* life requires reliance on others in some form or other. I don't grow my own food or make my own clothes. My plumbing and sewerage need to be connected to larger systems to work. My heating requires either gas or electricity to be supplied to my house. I own a car but I don't maintain the roads I drive on. My money is the form an entry in a bank's ledger. Even my cash only has value because of a system I am only a tiny tiny part of. I didn't build this PC (much less mine/extract/refine the materials needed).

Obviously I could go on.

My point is not to get this thread dragged into P&R territory, my point is that we rely on systems, institutions and people who could let us down all the time. And we do it because in most cases these other entities are better at doing whatever it is than we'd be on our own - otherwise I'd be wearing a sack as a smock and eating nettle soup or some such.

So by all means avoid using cloud services if you prefer to but don't think it's any more risky for those of us that do use them than say posting a letter and expecting it to get to its destination. Which is to say it works well enough most of the time and you can mitigate the risks somewhat (but not entirely).


(*i.e. post industrial revolution)

Yeah, but doing your own backups/storage is way easier than laying your own roads or most of those other things you listed. The cloud thing is more of a luxury than a necessity.

I grow food. I tried sewing. Good thing Walmart hasn't gone under or I'd be walking around in a towel with armholes.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Obviously, but the chance that one of the services you mention goes down is a lot smaller. If a service goes down, it's doable to switch to something else, without too many ill effects; maybe some discomfort. If a cloud service goes down and you relied on it as your only place of storage, you'll lose all your data instantly.

I think that cloud infrastructure is more robust and general infrastructure less robust that this implies. IOW I don't agree the chances are less.

And I think the equivalent "discomfort" is temporarily losing access to the service, maybe losing *some* data. It also means a little prepared-ness like having an alternate backup, or making sure e.g. Dropbox is sync-ing to multiple computers. This is equivalent to making sure you have canned goods, candles and torches.

I don't want to dissuade anyone from making backups but you make it sound like cloud services are really flaky and that's just not true. Know what does tend to be flaky? Home-grown backup schemes. Mostly because they rely on individuals who are not experts, have cheap equipment and are forgetful/fallible.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

Yeah, but doing your own backups/storage is way easier than laying your own roads or most of those other things you listed. The cloud thing is more of a luxury than a necessity.

Well a) I think it'll become more of a necessity as more things become digital only and b) I think doing your own backups is fairly easy. Doing it well and thinking about all the possible ways it could go wrong is harder.

But my point wasn't about ease it was about specialisation. I could learn to grow my own food. I wouldn't do it better than what I can buy from though. Not for most things.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by latepaul

I don't want to dissuade anyone from making backups but you make it sound like cloud services are really flaky and that's just not true. Know what does tend to be flaky? Home-grown backup schemes. Mostly because they rely on individuals who are not experts, have cheap equipment and are forgetful/fallible.

Cloud services aren't necessarily flaky, but their future is far from assured at this point in time. Other problems to note are possible price hikes, changes in terms and conditions, and changes in specification.

If you want to use a cloud service, then just buy a good NAS and put it at a family member's home for an off-site backup. Put *his* NAS in *your* home and you both have an off-site backup. Many NAS-es have cloud services and accompanying apps built in nowadays.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Cloud services aren't necessarily flaky, but their future is far from assured at this point in time. Other problems to note are possible price hikes, changes in terms and conditions, and changes in specification.

Those are problems where you have time to switch to a better service more suited to your needs.

I you want to use a cloud service, then just buy a good NAS and put it at a family member's home for an off-site backup. Put *his* NAS in *your* home and you both have an off-site backup. Many NAS-es have cloud services and accompanying apps built in nowadays.

Not a bad solution but I wouldn't pay for what I consider a "good" NAS and one of the consumer ones I would use, but I would treat it as not 100% reliable i.e. at the level of a cloud service

But the weak link for me would be my home broadband upload speeds which is why I use ownCloud on a hosted site.

[bullet]

No one has mentioned Spider Oak https://spideroak.com/
If you have sensitive data they encrypt it and do not know the key. Dropbox encrypts your data and may or may not know the key. Google Drive does not encrypt b/c they need to see the data for optical character recognition (yeah right).
The little sensitive digitized data I have is encrypted on a usb drive. I make certain to secure delete any decrypted version after use.

I use symlinks for some files in my home directory to my Dropbox directory and in turn to my Google Drive directory (Grive in linux) and make certain none of that data is sensitive. All this stuff is worth exactly what I paid for it as someone else mentioned.