don't trust cloud services with creative work
don't trust cloud services with creative work
179 comments
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The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust cloud companies.
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It’s worth noting that Google is 100x worse than the baseline level of sucking when it comes to randomly deleting your account with no recourse.
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Cloud can be a backup, it absolutely should never be your only copy.
But keep in mind they will probably use that data for anything they want, like training AI models. So make sure you are ok with them doing that on any data you put there. This is mostly why I fill my cloud space with incoherent nonsense.
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I just use an European cloud storage provider instead. It's cheaper than Google Drive and all the others. It just does not have the fancy client, which to me is a plus honestly.
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Always, always backup. And frequently! Don't trust your local harddrive (especially if it's a device you frequently take with you), don't trust flashdrives, don't even trust your local fileserver if it doesn't have built-in backups (and even if it does, check that those backups actually work). If it's not saved on at least two physical places (two drives in the same PC/server count, but it's sketchy on its own), it's not backed up!
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3-2-1 Backup: 3 copies, on 2 types of media, 1 of which is offsite.
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I just scatter mine under the fingernails of multiple unhoused individuals throughout the city. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s peace of mind. I’m thinking of expanding into microfiche hidden in fortune cookies next.
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two drives in the same PC/server count, but it’s sketchy on its own
If your house/office burns down, all your data is lost. At least one backup should be off-site!
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One backup copy isn't enough anyway! The more the merrier, just make sure that enough of it is automated that your backups don't get stale, and ideally stagger the timings so you don't immediately overwrite all the automated backups with trash data once something goes wrong.
At one point I accidentally deleted a file, but I could conveniently copy it from the copy in my fileserver that automatically gets updated every two weeks.
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Ah yes, the very first lesson I'd teach in my multimedia 'authoring' class: Back your shit up, here's 11 ways to do that; if you EVER tell me you lost your work as an excuse I'm going to LAUGH IN YOUR FACE as I assign you a ZERO.
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I never really liked Google, but their whole thing was supposed to be that you never needed to worry about backups.
But as Google so often does, they've decided to screw people over who relied on their drive and office suite.
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I never really liked Google, but their whole thing was supposed to be that you never needed to worry about backups.
no it wasn't. no sane person ever told you that. everyone always knew situation like the one described here will come sooner or later.
google might have told you so, but it is of similar value to when tobacco company tells you that smoking is healthy and to please continue smoking (and giving us money).
they’ve decided to screw people over who relied on their drive and office suite.
these people are not the customers. i will repeat that, because this part is really important - THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT THE CUSTOMERS.
when you don't pay for the service, you are not the customer, you are the merchandise that is being sold. and you are treated like one. when you are selling screwdrivers and one of them fall of the shelf, you don't bother yourself thinking if it hurt.
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a bit harsh, but often the most important lessons in life are those that hurt the most.
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I was training students for a deadline driven technical field. They needed to know that when deadline day comes, it's not "oopsie doopsy" my dog ate my homework, it's you are now out of business, everybody you work alongside is jobless, you are bankrupt, get your resume going and good luck dude.
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Using cloud services as the only copy is literally what I have been told to do working on my PhD by my supervisors. This is in the cybersecurity department. How you think this attitude is acceptable or normal is beyond me.
The whole point of modern cloud platforms is they worry about this so you don't have to. Not that people ever actually followed 321 backup policy anyway.
Edit: at least my stuff is on two different cloud services.
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This is the policy of most colleges these days. The school will provide a service to do that but it's up to the student to ensure their work is backed up. Granted most schools only offer OneDrive but still, you're told ahead of time.
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TLDR: make multiple backups
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Two is one and one is none
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And none is unacceptable
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This is extra bad because they want you to use cloud files in gdrive (I can't remember what the feature is actually called), which doesn't save the content locally on your computer, but puts an icon that will download the content from Google servers when you click on it. This means you have no local backup of your data in your computer backups.
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This is also why we're screaming about Windows and it's integrated AI that can scan your drive. What Google is doing here Windows could do in the future with your local files. "That's a nice collection of 2000s MP3s you have aaaand it's gone."
"That's a nice program you have there but the creator has revoked the licensing. So we disabled it until you update your license"
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And even then, if you make sure to copy the actual file, you'd still depend on them to open it if it's in their proprietary format.
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In the process of degoogling my life. Email and files are gone, but I use GMaps, still.
Google (still) offers a regular backup of your data to download. You can set it up to run at intervals and just download the entire thing. Includes file (and photos), email, messages, etc. It's great for products you forget you were using, and great for an offline backup.
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I use waze and google maps. Although I contribute sometimes with streetcomplete and openstreetmaps, their respective android apps are dog shit at navigating. Certain hiking trails and maybe biking trails though, they might be better but for things like driving cars, traffic reports, nearby attractions, google is still superior.
Edit: fixed bad grammar
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I have TWO USB backups.
My brother fucked one up for his Windows XP obsession. Which would be funny, if it were not dangerous.
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Justified obsession tbh.
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The only time in my life I've seriously considered suicide was when I lost the usb drive that had all my novel notes on it. If a major company ripped everything from me because "reasons", I'd be considering homicide instead.
By the way, git is good for more than just software. I keep my novel notes in a git repository these days.
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I do my writing in markdown. Keeps me from being distracted over formatting. Easily converted to HTML/EPUB for review and editing. git + plaintext + pandoc is a dream.
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The fuck was this dude watching/writing down for google to think it was related to terrorism or trafficking????
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They probably assumed it was a piracy list. To them, piracy is terrorism and trafficking.
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guess we just need to wiggle a sheet of paper with a list of book and movie titles to scare googie
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Taken and Zero Dark Thirty
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Lawrence of Arabia?
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Joker, the best movie ever made.
It has driven OP down a dark and twisted path of fighting THE MAN
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My partner wrote a couple of hardboiled PI novels about shady people doing shady shit.
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What a clusterfuck.
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Be careful who you trust with your data! And back it up
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That's a long way to go for an ad. Good read though.
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Mind spoiling it for me?
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Is local storage even safe from big corp just remotely nuking your files? I'm sure there's a secret button somewhere to mass delete photos from people's phones incase they start rolling in the tanks to crush a protest.
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reads like an ad for that service they plugged
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Maybe, but it's a well known writer's tool. I don't think they need to push this angle.
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So he just moves the files from one online storage to another? How stupid can one be?
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If I had to guess, what probably triggered the ToS violation was transferring the content the day before, maybe the method or client used to do the transfer was too aggressive.
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That makes zero sense. Why would a company like Google care about a few MB or less of text files?
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If I had to guess, there's more to this story than they're telling us. I've literally never heard of anyone losing access to their personal, legal files on Google drive because it violates their ToS. Google is a shit company and should be avoided, but this story just sounds like rage bait and maybe even just "organic" advertising for Scrivener.
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Agreed
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Two independent cloud storage providers is pretty good?
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How about having backups on physical media at home?
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Cloud drives are a handy form of secondary backup, IF you secure the contents with a tool like Cryptomator. I backup my content to a local NAS which one-way syncs nightly to an external drive attached to Raspberry Pi at my office and a cryptomator Dropbox, that in turn one way syncs to cryptomator Google Drive. I also manually encrypt and upload important documents to Proton Drive and Mega as cold storage.
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I just realized the other day that one of the updates on my Chromebook automatically installed something called "NotebookLM" on my app bar. Never asked for it. Never even looked at apps on my Chromebook before. But it's there now, and it super secret bloodswap pinky swares it won't steal my ideas or writing. What an odd thing to say on first open.
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That's why I make my writing with a typewriter. With tesseract I have a LibreOffice version in a few minutes.
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I know it's a big jump from Adobe Cloud (which probably used user behavior tracking and their work to train AI) but it is possible to make great stuff with open source apps now.
The newly released GIMP 3.0 is quite amazing considering that it is free. Is it as good as Photoshop? Maybe it lacks all the features, but it's pretty damn good. If you install GMIC, an amazing suite of tools, it gets that much closer. Inkscape is also professional level for vector work now. Honorable mentions to Krita and kdenlive (for video editing). edit: I shouldn't leave out blender, jeesus.
I left Adobe Cloud 9 years ago. Yeah I had to endure a lot of ridicule and weird looks when I told people that I only worked in GIMP, but more recently, the response is less "You're weird" and more "I need Cloud for my job/it's all I know," which is a positive change.
If nobody ever makes the leap, things will stay the same indefinitely. Don't expect market forces to change things.
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You know a good open source Illustrator alternative? I’ve only worked with Inkscape here and there, but the interface is pretty challenging for me to wrap my head around after spending so much time in Illustrator
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graphite looks promising but is still in early days
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The only solid vector graphics app I've used in open source is Inkscape. I agree, it's very difficult to get to know, even moreso if you're coming from old school raster imaging and don't get all the mathiness. I had to learn Inkscape though, because I needed to make fantasy maps with textual titles that didn't look like crap when rescaled.
I'm no expert, but it does pay off to learn. It's a very powerful set of tools.
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Honestly, GIMP and Inkscape are a sad joke. Affinity Photo/Designer are the best option right now, I think. All the features without a cloud.
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You have your own definitions of joke, best, and sad. That's fine.
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There was a cool browser extension back in the days that changed the word "cloud" to "someone else's computer" in the articles on the internet. It changes perspective and eliminates a lot of headache this way.
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This reframing can be super useful in getting corporate types to understand that storing stuff in the cloud isn't a magic solution, and that it comes with its own problems (especially in terms of data governance stuff).
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Even on weather articles?
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Especially on the weather articles. Heavy someone else's computers with the good chance of rain.
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Cloud backup has its place, just as offline physical backup does. They solve for two different problems and you need both.
Cloud backup - mindless. Set it and it regularly backs up things you do, even when you're remote. Offline backup - fairly dependable, but not updated as often. Requires over action on the part of the user. Can't use remotely if you also want to secure the created offline backup.
So best use case would be cloud backup all the time, and a physical offline backup you control at regular intervals, that you'll actually do.
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physical offline backup you control at regular intervals, that you’ll actually do.
ouch, right in my executive dysfunction!
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Cloud backups are fine as an absolute last resort for if your house burns down and you lose all local copies of your data. But you should never trust a cloud service to keep the only copy of your data. And you should absolutely never store your data unencrypted on a cloud service. All it takes is one undesirable file (say, a movie you torrented) making its way into your backups for your account to be terminated.
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But you should never trust a cloud service to keep the only copy of your data.
You should never trust any backup solution to be the only copy of your data.
Cloud backups are fine as an absolute last resort for if your house burns down and you lose all local copies of your data.
I assume you backup locally at home. Do you ever travel away from home and create files? Do you just roll the dice and assume your device with you will never have a technical failure or be stolen?
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Laughs in self hosted datacenter
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Reminds me of when I had about 3 or 4 TB in my schools storage because hey free benefit
They removed the education free unlimited storage during my senior year and blocked access to my supposedly permanent school email because I didn't reduce my storage usage lol
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I mean it's technically permanent as long as your organization continues paying for the license
Of course, they could downgrade your license or revoke it at any time. And they definitely will revoke it when you graduate (so they can reallocate the licensing costs to new students).
Your work/school accounts don't belong to you.
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Forgot to mention but my school advertised permanent access to our school email, which back then meant free student benefits like the education unlimited storage. I technically still do have access, but it's a lot less useful nowadays
Google just went back on that education unlimited thing because they realized it was not sustainable, so my school had to enforce it somehow
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[AI slop reporting intensifies]
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You can download stuff off your Google account here. Select what you want, not all or it might fail. Choose format, and wait for the email.
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This should be painfully obvious to anyone who spends a second thinking about it. It frustrates me to no end that people just trust these "services" blindly, when they can at any time, for any reason, take away your access with no recourse. Why do people accept these terms? Why do they trust companies that are not on their side? I struggle to understand it. Cloud should only be used as a backup - and not the only one at that. Is this an issue with computer literacy? Is it that people don't understand how data is saved?
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Don't use Google trash. Google is evil.
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I'm fully expecting them to straight up delete something... And then release it as theirs any day now
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The cloud is only part of 321
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I've not missed cloud functionality since I worked out Proton Drive and Syncthing.
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Boomers remember when they made memorable movies, and now they fight for people to forget them.
179 comments
Am I too old? I only trust hard saving to offline storage. Be that an external hdd or a flash drive.
I'm in university (as an old) and just about everyone from faculty to staff has been pushing me to put everything in OneDrive. I know better, but young people tend to trust that an educational institution is looking out for them.
My freshman year I met teenagers who didn't know what a flash drive is. Most of them have iPads with no storage, one of my classmates was just uploading all her lectures directly to YouTube so she could review them later.
There's nothing wrong with putting everything in OneDrive... as long as you also have it somewhere else.
At work we're told to put everything into OneDrive and we're blocked from using USB drives, or using any other online storage. Fortunately all of the data I use and create on my work computer belongs to my employer, so if they only trust MS with their data then who am I to argue?
wait, are you saying that twenty-something is old? 😂
You don't need to trust to use cloud services, I copy encrypted backups into the cloud. The only risk is that they don't give it back but that's why you have multiple backups.
Yeah this is the answer.
This old school idea of "keep it on a drive" misses the fact that you can lose it, forget it, it can break, hardware can fail, etc.
If you have your book on a flash drive and it breaks, good luck. I have my stuff on 3 different services encrypted. I can literally get my info from anywhere at any time.
Especially trusting cloud storage without a local backup for psyche-critical work - absolutely bonkers
I always get told that they would never take your stuff away, even though there are lots of examples.
Yes we're too experienced and sceptical.
Yes. No one ever listened except the other nerds from our generation. Everyone else was to old to understand at the time and the rest just jumped in because they learned it in preschool.
No, you aren’t. I only use it because my work makes me to be able to share with everyone in the district.
i use ms word to save certain things, offline, an older version of office not the new ms office that forces AI. i do that to save certain things, like resumes,,,etc.
Lemmy taught me that if you try to cancel, they'll offer you ms sans-ai. Save 3 whole bucks too.
I don't trust having only local files. Ideally you should have multiple local copies with at least one cloud storage and encrypt everything before you upload, so unless your house catches on fire and your cloud storage also fucks you over at the same time, then you are protected against both risks if they happen as separate incidents.
Also maybe go somewhere in the woods and hide a box of encrypted hard drives there, just to be extra safe. So three backups. Your house, A box buried in the woods, and cloud storage.
You are not too old. I feel the exact same way. Anything worth keeping should be saved locally. Plus storage today is so cheap, there really is no excuse to save exclusively on the cloud.