Cloud storage offers really good durability. If you store data on your own hard drive at home, and the data is important to you, you need to do redundancy yourself. Do you have a plan to recover from a hard drive failure? What if your house catches on fire and burns your backups as well?
If you encrypt before uploading they won't even know what it is that you're storing. Just have to make sure you keep your encryption keys safe.
I have two external encrypted 5T hard drives, one I keep at home and one I keep at a family member’s house. The cloud is too expensive to store video on.
My NAS has built in support for all of this by default. Simply put multiple drives in and press Go. The NAS does the rest. It is that easy. I never worry about the integrity of my files. I once had a drive go bad and I received a text message that one of my disks had a problem. I simply pulled it out and installed a new one. I was done.
RAID is not a backup.
Correct. I use raid 0 and run automatic backups to a backup disk.
Yeah but in case of fire or tornado you're screwed unless you have an offsite backup.
The NAS has remote backup capability. I don't use that particular feature, but it's there. My point is, you can buy a NAS that does everything the cloud does for a one time fee. I swear by it. There is even a mobile app that allows you to easily move files back and forth.
Doesn't protect against destruction of NAS.
That or a nuclear blast.
You could use a raid setup to mitigate hard drive failure. Your points are totally valid.
Right. It depends on how much you value your data. Cloud services boast some ridiculous durability value like 99.9999999% or probably even higher if they mirror it across multiple data centers. RAID mitigates single disk failures (or multi-disk failures, depending on the type of RAID) but does not protect you from malfunction of the device itself (imagine it writing random data all over your disks), accidental deletions, ransomware attacks, or a house fire.
Cloud isn't inherently good or bad. It's just another tool that you can use. You just have to be aware of the risks and plan accordingly.
Just have to make sure you keep your encryption keys safe
Probably do like with Bitcoin: use a multi-word phrase to generate the key, so you can write it on paper and store in another location.
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