The Trouble with Cloud Storage
I should say at the outset that I'm not against cloud storage as a concept. The idea of keeping files on a remote server that you can access from anywhere is perfectly reasonable. My issue is with the way it's been marketed and adopted — as though putting your files in someone else's data center is inherently safer and more convenient than keeping them on hardware you control. In my experience, it's often neither.
The fundamental problem is dependency. When your files are on a local drive, you need that drive to work. When your files are in the cloud, you need the service to exist, to remain affordable, to maintain its terms of service in a way that continues to work for you, and to keep your data accessible in a format you can actually use. That's a lot of dependencies, and every one of them is outside your control.
I've watched enough services come and go to be wary. Some of them were small startups that ran out of money. Some were products of large companies that decided the product didn't align with their strategy anymore. Remember when Google offered unlimited photo storage and then decided it wasn't unlimited after all? Or when various sync services changed their pricing tiers and suddenly the amount of storage you'd been using for free cost fifteen dollars a month? These aren't hypothetical risks. They're things that have happened, repeatedly, to real people with real files.
The counterargument is usually: "But hard drives fail." Yes. They do. I've lost data to hard drive failure. It's an unpleasant experience that I've taken steps to avoid repeating. But a hard drive failure is a local, understandable problem. The drive broke. You replace it. If you had a backup, you restore from the backup. A cloud service shutting down or changing terms is a systemic problem that you can't fix by buying new hardware.
My approach to backups is straightforward and not particularly original. I keep my working files on a local SSD. I back up to a second local drive on a regular schedule — daily for active projects, weekly for everything else. And I keep an additional copy off-site, which in my case means a portable drive that I store at a location that isn't my home. Some people would use a cloud service for this off-site component, and I understand the logic. I've chosen not to, mostly because the volume of data I need to protect isn't large enough to justify the ongoing cost or the dependency.
The three-copy approach — original, local backup, off-site backup — isn't new. It's basically the 3-2-1 rule that backup professionals have advocated for decades. Three copies of your data, on at least two different types of media, with at least one copy off-site. It's simple, it works, and it doesn't require trusting any third party with your files.
I'll acknowledge that cloud storage has advantages I'm choosing to forgo. Automatic syncing across devices is convenient if you work on multiple machines. Collaboration features are useful if you're sharing files with other people frequently. And for someone who doesn't want to think about backups at all, having a service handle it is better than having no backup strategy whatsoever, which is the realistic alternative for a lot of people.
But I do think about backups. It's part of how I was trained, both formally and through hard experience. And when I think about backups, I think about longevity and control. Will I be able to access these files in ten years? With local storage, the answer depends on whether I maintain my hardware and keep copies current. With cloud storage, the answer depends on whether a company I have no relationship with continues to operate a service I have no control over at a price I can afford. I know which of those variables I'd rather manage.
There's also the privacy dimension, though I want to be careful not to overstate it. I'm not doing anything that requires secrecy. My files are boring — documents, spreadsheets, scanned records, project files. But I still don't love the idea of them sitting on someone else's server, subject to someone else's terms of service, potentially accessible to someone else's employees or automated systems. Local storage is private by default. Cloud storage is private by policy, and policies change.
I realize this puts me in a minority. Most people I know use some form of cloud storage without thinking much about it, and most of them have had no problems. The services generally work as advertised. The prices, while not static, are usually reasonable. The data is generally safe. My concerns are about the tail risks — the unlikely but consequential scenarios where the service goes away, or the terms change dramatically, or an account gets locked for reasons you don't understand and can't easily resolve.
Maybe I'm being overly cautious. I've been told as much. But I've also been the person someone calls when their cloud storage provider has made their files inaccessible and they don't have a local copy, and those conversations are never fun. A hard drive in your desk drawer isn't glamorous. It doesn't sync. It doesn't have an app. But it's yours, it's there, and it works whether or not someone in a distant office decides to change the pricing model.
I'll keep my files close, thanks.
— Kevin V.