Never trust any storage device you do not own.
Going into the cloud opens you up to an abundance of risks that you really don’t need if you just spend a little time maintaining your own set of data backups. If you own a business, this is more crucial than ever given the number of ransomware attacks in the post-COVID era.
To give you examples of why the cloud is only good as – at best – a tertiary backup would take more space than we have in this news section. How many stories have you heard about a business or an entire industry suffering a data breach? Just this year it has happened to large sections of both the automotive and medical industries.
Give the 3-2-1-1-0 rule some serious thought. 3 copies of your data (including the production data you use daily). 2 different backups. 1 copy needs to be offsite. At least 1 copy needs to be in cold storage (i.e. not connected to any device that has an internet connection). 0 errors can be allowed to exist on the backup copies.
You can get a two-terabyte external hard drive for under $100. Or you can spend roughly the same amount of money on one year’s worth of cloud storage and be at the mercy of your cloud provider and every hacker on the planet. If you want to spend that $100 or more every year, let me suggest three subscriptions to this newspaper: one for yourself and two as gifts.
Up in the cloud, your data is entirely in someone else’s hands. If you don’t own a business and all your digital data is personal, why would you use the cloud? Would you hand a box of photos of your family to some random person and say “Here’s $10 a month to put these on YOUR shelf until I want to see them again. Please don’t look at any of them. And don’t let anyone else look either.”
Never trust any storage device you do not own. Yes, it does bear repeating. Over and over.
Going online to Amazon or down the road to Best Buy or even – gasp – Walmart to buy a pair of external hard drives will not take much time, money, or effort. You can do it on a lunch hour and still have time for the lunch.
To trust the cloud is to trust your data and every piece of information your customers give you to a faceless, non-human device that you cannot look at, touch, or hold to account if a hacker, a fire in a server farm, or even a big enough sunspot wipes out everything.
Let me say it one more time for emphasis: Never trust any storage device you do not own.
You have nothing to lose by maintaining your own backups … except every single bit of data you need.
Down with the cloud!
Thanks to his father, Stanley (like the power drill), Stu Clampitt has been dealing with computers since 1978. He is the publisher of The Hamilton County Reporter and he adores a good Rickroll.