Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I never use on-line (cloud) for active storage, only backup.
No passwords in the cloud either.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

Yes you do. I will only give two examples but there are many more.

1. Phone scams are conducted using computers. Every single time I drop something, like painting or being under the car, to answer the phone (in case it was something important like my mother-in-law has had a heart attack) then there has been a cost - in my case time, and (see second point) everybody's case time and money.
2. The internet would be so much faster and your computer would be 10% faster (so money costs spent here for starters) without spammers using it up. Then you had to buy software programs, called antivirus programs, to keep the same, or different, scammers at bay.

So you have paid real money.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

cloud should be one of your MANY backups...

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Q

I take your point(s) but, while I abhor spammers, I use common sense measures to deal with them. For my phone, I use a zero-cost ap called Nomorobo which is very effective at screening out robot calls, then I let any other calls that come in that I don’t recognize go to the answer phone or VM — none of that increases my cost in either$ or time. Regarding email spam, relegating the usual suspects to Junk status takes care of the lot, and the rest takes maybe 30-45 seconds a day to delete. Since I pay a set fee for IP access and I’m retired (so my time is pretty cheap) the cost is minimal, and in both cases, the only alternative is terminating internet and phone service, which I notice you’re not willing to do or you wouldn't be on UHH - it’s just the cost associated with the convenience and power of the communication method.

BUT, we digress - all this has zero to do with your inate distrust of all things cloud because a fREE service, that you benefitted from at no cost, had the timerity to give you two months notice that the service would no longer be FREE? You have a very simple solution - PAY for the service you wish to use - Google will sell you that, and as a major provider, it’s an excellent DR copy - you just don’t want to pay the price. Now unless you have fast Internet, 10TB is an unwieldy amount of data to “seed” into the cloud, and the least expensive solid cloud storage I know of is Amazon Glacier at $0.004 per GB / Month. If that isn’t workable, then you’ll have to chose a different archive/DR method, but that does NOT mean it isn’t an excellent choice with others with different requirements.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

I don't use Google+. I cannot remember ever signing up for it but I 'obviously' did. I was using this as an example of how things can disappear on you internet related. Since this is about the 10th thing, over the years, that have disappeared on me I have become less trustfull of anything provided free or paid for over (as a service) the internet.
You have heard the saying 'once bitten, twice shy'. Well you would think I would learn after 10 times being bitten. I am really passing on the fact that I seem unable to learn from my mistakes.
I am also retired but previously was a self employed PC consultant. So not only have I seen my own mistakes I was also party to those made by my clients, and they were legend. Although this provided me with an income it also made me see how a whole lot of other people also didn't learn from their mistakes regarding the internet. It has made me very wary.

smosphoto Loc: Florida

I can tell you from experience you CAN have that cake and eat it too. It's called BackBlaze. Unlimited storage, UNLIMITED! I believe I pay $50.00 a year. I have well over 800,000 photos backed up on there plus my crucial computer info. It runs in the background and grabs every new document, photo, file, etc. you add to the computer or ext. hard drive. When my old computer took a dive, it was put to the test.... I had everything back on the new one in one day. I do as well back up on external disks, but I am here to tell you, BackBlaze works and lives up to their promise. Just food for thought.

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

Or if you are hospitalized and helplessly incapacitated for a lengthy period. Let's say, seriously injured in a vehicle accident or in a fire. You finally get home after enduring a long, difficult recovery, only to discover that the hosting service you relied on to store your files is no more.

elf

As others have said, I don't trust the cloud! I feel that everything on my computer is open to them. I put every photo on an external hard drive and even that failed once. I suppose that I need a second one for backup.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Y

If you research the subject, you’ll only find one small cloud provider that went belly-up, and in that case, there was adequate notice given (months) to move your data, and that was a company that was MUCH smaller than the mJor companies I mentioned above. If Amazon, Google, Microsoft and/or Apple goes belly-up without long notice, it’s likely you’ll have bigger problems to concern you, BUT it shouldn’t matter if they did because you would/should have two other copies - your active storage and your on-site backup. Cloud storage is not designed to replace either of those - it’s a last-resort DR or archive storage.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

And if you had a backup and a DR copy, the failure of that external (which is a given sooner or later) would have been a mere inconvenience. Didn’t that failure convince you of the need for a backup?

Bipod

And that's over how many years of history?

Where or where are Global Exchange, MCI, Netcom, Northern Telecomm today? Not to mention ten thousand
time-sharing service bureaus?

Bipod

A parable:

Suppose you drill a well in the Sahara, put in a pump, and let the
local Bedouin use it for five years. Then one summer, you turn it off.
It's your well. If children die, it's not your fault --you are exercising
your property rights as an owner. You have rights!

Those people who died should have used the public well (of course,
there isn't one) or drilled their own (they couldn't afford it). You gave
a whole 30 days notice! And you haven't broken any law.
No body has a God-given ight to water to drink--that's socialism!

Those families who's children died got free water! They should be greatful!
Maybe we should stick them in an internment camp until they learn to be
grateful for our generosity?

(You know, that's not how we used to think in the USA. After WW II,
we were generous and did protect people.)

Shutterbug57

There are 2 reasons I don’t use the cloud for back-up purposes:

1. I have had an online service provider cease operations without notice. It was hosting part of my website and one day it just stopped ops and when you went to my galleries it stated that the provider had gone out of business. FWIW, this was a paid service I had used for years and I lost money when they just went away.

2. Many of the EULAs regarding online storage grant free rights to the storing operation. This is not universally the case, but I don’t have time to read several EULAs to sort it out.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Why does anyone save online?
It seems quite silly.
This example is not unique.
External drives are relatively cheap.
Have a couple for backups and replace every 5-6 years alternating.
There are more elaborate ways but this is simple, effective and cheap.

Chadp Loc: Virginia Beach

[quote=chrissybabe]" Note that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted. "

Google + was never meant to be a cloud storage platform. It was a weak attempt at social media similar to Facebook by google. The message from Google states that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted. So I don’t see the issue here.

But I do remember one of the first things I learned in business school. “All businesses are temporary”. So...