Traveller_Jeff

National Geographic brought this to my attention. More research sent me to the following news:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-photos-to-end-free-unlimited-storage-from-june-next-year/

T-J

no12mo

This happens more times than I wish to recall. AOL had a "Z" drive. Like an idiot, I uploaded quite a few pics up on the Z drive for sharing. Then suddenly with short notice, the "Z" drive went away. Never, never use the cloud for important backups. It may be convenient but if you upload and then delete to make more space on your local computer you take a chance of losing everything. Buy a 2 TB external drive and learn how to copy your pics to it.

Vienna74 Loc: Bountiful, Utah now Panama

The problem is not with cloud storage, but with FREE cloud storage. It is not enough to have a local backup (although I have that too). A fire will destroy your original and backup together. A paid cloud storage service is worth the protection and there are several reputable, well-established companies. I happen to use Backblaze both at home and at work and I love it.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Not enough demand or
not enough advertising revenue to pay for the free stuff?

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

Did Google eliminate "free" or did they limit "free" to 15GB? That's about 4000 JPEGs.

So maybe the question is if Google Photos is about photo sharing or "free" unlimited backups.

fjdarling Loc: Mesa, Arizona, USA

LOL...as I read this post, there are two ads for free cloud storage on the page. Personally, I feel that free cloud storage is worth exactly what it costs you.

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

+1

Failures of cloud storage is very rare. Disappearance of Free Cloud Storage is not so rare.

Cloud storage is significantly safer than local storage. The files are duplicated and distributed over a much wider area than you could do at home. And the storage media are maintained by professionals, not like your local storage which is probably (like mine) maintained by an amateur.

However, due to bandwidth issues, local storage is significantly more convenient. The thing about cloud storage is that it will be there when a disaster wipes out your local storage. Maybe that sort of thing doesn't happen too often, but it does happen.

Both local AND cloud storage are important.

JRiepe Loc: Southern Illinois

I think we'll be able to afford it.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Paid can do it to you also, esp in rough economic times when companies may go bankrupt.
Back in ye olde days when this stuff first started I read an article by/about a photographer who did work for Nat Geo and Smithsonian etc. He was one of the first to rely on digital cameras. He was doing a major feature on a nomadic group in far western China for Nat Geo. Every few weeks he went east to a major city to get supplies etc and while there went on line to check e-mail and loaded all his work to that point into one of the first "major" cloud services (don't remember its name). Laptops etc. in those days you will remember had what we would now regard as "tiny" drives. He kept a few of his best on memory cards but most of his work - I seem to remember it was something like 6000 edited images - was loaded to that service over a period of several months then deleted from his laptop so he had room for more work. Well his last time the break between visits to that city was over a month because the nomads were shifting a major distance between seasons and he stayed with them for the whole move. He gets back to the city, hooks up and downloads his back e-mails from about 5-6 weeks. One e-mail dated the day after he was last on stated the cloud company had gone bankrupt and the new owners were giving everyone 30 days to either sign up with them or download your files. Then the servers were going to be formatted etc. The e-mail was 32 days old. He contacted the new owners and his stuff was gone already. He was able to put together his article for Nat Geo but not really as good as what he wanted. And of course he couldn't put together articles for others because Nat Geo would scream if he reused the images so that cut into his potential income.
At the time I was trying to decide if I would start using cloud storage or just buy more/bigger external drives - care to guess what I decided?
Back then I also burned important things to CDs and later DVDs but now I buy large usb thumb drives for special storage. My external back up drive is 8TB and I use Acronis to do a backup every day at 10PM - one full followed by 6 incremental per week and I keep two weeks worth. I also have some older, small external drives I used to use for backups that I just now decided will become backup backup drives with special things on them, like my pictures and editing files.

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

So back in ye olde days* technology was not advanced enough to keep your backups local and mobile. That is certainly not the case today.

I would like to emphasize that I consider cloud storage an important part of a backup strategy. I consider local storage an important part of a backup strategy.

Local storage is convenient. You have access to it even if your internet connection is down. You can restore files at the fastest rate possible using your local drives.

OTOH, cloud storage is safer. The keys to backup include duplication, distribution, verification, and maintenance. Local storage can be easily duplicated and verified. Distributed is a bit harder since distancee tends to make synchronization less convenient. Maintenance of local drives is left to amateurs for the most part. Cloud storage duplicates also, it distributes copies across the country if not across continents, leaving less chance that a regional disaster will wipe out all the copies (and regional disasters are becoming more common these days). Maintenance is done by professionals.

*The 'y' in ye olde days is not a 'y'. It is an old english character called a thorn, and is pronounced 'th'.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

As in Þingvellir. They made Þ a usable HTML character.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Thanks, I knew the language lesson part, I am a retired History teacher.
But as to the cloud - I still am not using it. In a real major disaster, I live in Earthquake country or say some nice people hack, sabotage etc the internet that Cloud will not be available. If I were to move to some remote area (The Wife, a city girl, dreams about that and I have to talk her out of it from time to time.) then not being able to access the cloud is even more likely.
Of course under those circumstances I might not give a S**t about computers or the cloud but might really be worried about meds, food, fuel and ammo.

Traveller_Jeff

So the year 2001, the date September 11. The place: Deutsche Bank across the street from the Twin Towers. Though that building did not collapse as did the Towers, all power and communication in lower Manhattan as well as throughout New York city went out, all back ups interrupted, yet Deutsche Bank didn't lose a nanosecond's worth of data. They had simultaneous saves in remote data storage already set up in strategic sites in the U.S. as well as in Europe as a hedge against national catastrophe. I learned this from one of their top IT guys soon afterward. So, what's the moral? Is there one? Can individuals set up off-site locations to simultaneously save new data as we do so in our own locations? Is it worth the time or trouble? Probably not. But my son-in-law does keep a full set of his company's backups in his office and home which he updates a couple of times per week at least as a hedge against loss due to theft, fire or flood.

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

If you are running a business, it is strongly advisable to back up your stuff both locally and in the cloud, duplicated and distributed both ways.

If you are dealing with your own personal files, it's your choice to back them up or not. It all depends on how valuable they are to you. Would they cause you pain if they disappeared or merely mild discomfort?

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

$ for over 15Gb...
<15Gb still free.

Not ending free across the board.