Cloud Storage

Thread Starter

Papabravo

Joined Feb 24, 2006
21,158
Does anybody have experience with the use of Cloud Storage for backup and collaboration. Are there companies and apps that are to be avoided?
 

SamR

Joined Mar 19, 2019
5,031
Cloud for backup, dropbox for collaboration. I've used Norton Security for years and it now backs up to their cloud automatically. Not even sure what their size limit for free service is as I have not exceeded it. Never had a hard drive failure so never tried to download from the backup. Used to have an external backup terabyte drive that got filled up and so became useless. I do have some serious reservations about my personal information being exported to a source that I have no security control over and having to rely on their security expertise. Dell just recently informed me that I had a free terabyte of cloud service available as has also Microsoft. Anything over that gets charged for. Terabyte sounds like a lot but isn't these days. The trick would be to be very selective in what you back up and do it from a list of pertinent subdirectories only and not back up the entire drive every time there is an OS upgrade or patch which is often.
 

Thread Starter

Papabravo

Joined Feb 24, 2006
21,158
Great stuff - but NEVER FORGET that it is not yours anymore, and can vanish at any second- especially if you are not paying for it.

Back it all up locally.
Back it all up locally.
Back it all up locally.
Tri-modular redundancy: 3 drives, 500 GB, 1TB & 2TB. The 500 GB is less than half full and is the oldest drive. The cloud would only be a convenience backup, like if I ever go traveling again. How about for collaboration?
 

402DF855

Joined Feb 9, 2013
271
I back up source code changes daily, at least, to two or three PCs. Every six months or so, complete backups to a 2TB drive, and several SD and flash drives. I'm considering cloud for long term storage but I'll certainly encrypt the files first.
 

Thread Starter

Papabravo

Joined Feb 24, 2006
21,158
Ideally what I would like to have is something of limited capacity that I would not have to pay for and that was publicly accessible.

I just went around and around with Amazon because my Kindle app stopped working and I've lost my only E-book. A pox on there miserable hovels!
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
9,069
Ideally what I would like to have is something of limited capacity that I would not have to pay for and that was publicly accessible.

I just went around and around with Amazon because my Kindle app stopped working and I've lost my only E-book. A pox on there miserable hovels!
I use a free dropbox account but it may be a grandfathered thing. When I look at their site, I don't see a free account anymore.

Backup will always cost something, and it should, after all you have to count on it, you want to be a customer not a product. Backblaze is very affordable.
 

sagor

Joined Mar 10, 2019
903
Great stuff - but NEVER FORGET that it is not yours anymore, and can vanish at any second- especially if you are not paying for it.

Back it all up locally.
Back it all up locally.
Back it all up locally.
Agree. I only do local backups. I also have my backup utility on a bootable USB stick, as well on bootable CD (for older machines). One has to remember, when the system drive crashes, you have no internet until you recover your system. Catch 22. How to do that varies, but not easy without an operating system connected to your "cloud". You can't recover without your recovery, unless the "cloud" system gives you some form of bootable media to recover with.
I backup system disk every week to separate HDD D: drive, then copy that to another internal drive. After that, I copy the backup to an external drive which is only online to get the backup copy. 3 copies in total. I keep a couple of weeks worth of backups as a minimum. I only had to use a "backup restore" once in the 10 years I've had this system...
 

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
I back up source code changes daily, at least, to two or three PCs. Every six months or so, complete backups to a 2TB drive, and several SD and flash drives. I'm considering cloud for long term storage but I'll certainly encrypt the files first.
Why not use GitHub?
 

bogosort

Joined Sep 24, 2011
696
I only do local backups.
What happens if you have a fire? To be most effective, backups should be automatic and distributed.

You can't recover without your recovery, unless the "cloud" system gives you some form of bootable media to recover with.
Everyone has different disaster recovery priorities, but for my personal data, I just need it to be recoverable, not recoverable within x hours. Whether my main hard drive dies or a flood destroys my computer, it'll take me a few days to get a new system going, so I'm fine to wait for Backblaze to ship me an external drive with all my data on it.

I have different priorities at work -- if a software repo or database server goes down, we need it back up within hours. Consequently, I have multiple "live", remotely distributed backups of critical data. Spinning up ready-to-go VMs takes seconds, so the only question is how fresh the data needs to be.
 

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
Lots of people backup their systems and their data often for years. Yet they never proof test it, so when an outage does arise people say "Oh we're OK we have everything backed up" yet have never attempted to recover.

Often the first time people ever actually try to recover from backups is when there's been a true, genuine, serious outage and they are often surprised at how hard it can be to recover even with backups.
 

SamR

Joined Mar 19, 2019
5,031
I once spent over 16 hours restoring a Xenix OS control system having to use 5.25" floppies. That ended up being a 28-hour workday. Yes, you need to be able to boot and know how to restore from a dead drive. After that I built a spare "hot" system to avoid any future operations area downtime by a quick changeout. Over 2 shifts of operations downtime was not a good place to be in.
 

402DF855

Joined Feb 9, 2013
271
Why not use GitHub?
I've accessed GitHub for open source repos, but can't think of any advantage to using for my own personal projects. My backup procedure is quite secure. I store in ZIPs and test the copied files for errors. The files within the ZIPs are the complete set of source code control database files of my own design and have CRCs stored for each and every file, which I check regularly.

Further, git is powerful, abysmal, complicated and no doubt designed by Satan himself. I recommend developers become familiar with it just enough to do basic things but avoid all the complexity that comes with it.
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
9,069
I've accessed GitHub for open source repos, but can't think of any advantage to using for my own personal projects. My backup procedure is quite secure.
Git is version control, not backup. That it has a copy of your source is a side effect, not its purpose.
 

402DF855

Joined Feb 9, 2013
271
Git is version control, not backup.
Actually, git appears to be a workflow tool; advocates use it for more than source control. Hence the complexity, and hence I have little use for it. First time I used a flavor of git, it kept telling me I had a detached head. Still don't know what that means, and I don't want to know.

My source control is of my own design and is an integrated part of my backup. Everything I backup is in the repo, including family photos, documents, in addition to source code.
 

Thread Starter

Papabravo

Joined Feb 24, 2006
21,158
So Source Forge has Git as an option but also has other alternatives. Might one of those be easier to use than making the investment in learning Git?
 
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