don't trust cloud services with creative work
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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.
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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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.
a bit harsh, but often the most important lessons in life are those that hurt the most.
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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.
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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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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Yes, but how are they going to wipe my offline backups?
if a government or corporation or whoever is seeking to delete your personal files specifically, i think you have much bigger problems to worry about
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Under normal circumstances, they can't. But if they actually want to target you and they want to spend the time and resources, they could potentially send instructions to the backdoor to secretly sabotage the backup process:
Basically showing you that the backup is working, while in the background, it has been encrypting the files to a key they control during that backup process, and essentialy act as ransomware. (Modern computing has made hardware encryption so fast that it would be seamless, so it would be hard to notice that happening.)
So every time you check the backup's integrity, it uses the key to unlock the files and show you "everything is fine".
But when the time comes, they would nuke the keys from the Intel ME / AMD PSP then next time you try to access your files, you get an error message, then you try to plug in the backup drive, also shows errors. Because they already nuked the keys, you have a bunch of encrypted data you can't access.
Sounds far fetched, but theoretically its possible.
They would just as well nuke me litetally if we are that far down
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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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I don't think they can nuke files from my linux computer.
yeah, the funny and sad thing here is, that there are people in the world for whom "locally" means "in my phone".
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Under normal circumstances, they can't. But if they actually want to target you and they want to spend the time and resources, they could potentially send instructions to the backdoor to secretly sabotage the backup process:
Basically showing you that the backup is working, while in the background, it has been encrypting the files to a key they control during that backup process, and essentialy act as ransomware. (Modern computing has made hardware encryption so fast that it would be seamless, so it would be hard to notice that happening.)
So every time you check the backup's integrity, it uses the key to unlock the files and show you "everything is fine".
But when the time comes, they would nuke the keys from the Intel ME / AMD PSP then next time you try to access your files, you get an error message, then you try to plug in the backup drive, also shows errors. Because they already nuked the keys, you have a bunch of encrypted data you can't access.
Sounds far fetched, but theoretically its possible.
Belarusian hackers apparently did pretty precisely this to the biggest airline in the Russia, Aeroflot. They had been doing something for a whole year that successfully disabled Aeroflot's backups, and deleted everything from every computer belonging to that company. They no longer know who's working for them, for example.
I'd assume they must've done pretty precisely what you just described. So, it has been done once. And it probably will be done again, somewhere.
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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.
I’m in university (as an old) (...) I know better, but young people
wait, are you saying that twenty-something is old?
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Laughs in self hosted datacenter
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Famously Americans did the splitting thing once before with Standard Oil and it was immensely beneficial to the economy in general. Just checked the wiki and it was more than 100 years ago. Unlikely the same laws are still on the books.
There are several companies currently active that deserve the same treatment.
We also nationalized several enormous companies with arguably excellent results (ConEd, Amtrak, the post-WWI FRA).
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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.
I only do manual backups, but I'm the kind of person who does it multiple times a day anyway - whenever I do a major edit on a work or hobby file - just for my peace of mind
And yes, only "airlocked" backups. I manually use FreeFileSync to mirror my files to a local backup folder on another HDD (I have multiple paired folders set up inside that, so FFS doesn't have to check tens of thousands of other files if I only edited a particular project that day), and keep only that synced to Google Drive. So if either the active local copy or Google Drive is corrupted or lost, the file is not automatically lost on the other end. I also found it a neat surprise that Google Drive retains past versions of files, it came handy a few times.
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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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The fuck was this dude watching/writing down for google to think it was related to terrorism or trafficking????
Taken and Zero Dark Thirty
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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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I have TWO USB backups.
My brother fucked one up for his Windows XP obsession. Which would be funny, if it were not dangerous.
Justified obsession tbh.
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Famously Americans did the splitting thing once before with Standard Oil and it was immensely beneficial to the economy in general. Just checked the wiki and it was more than 100 years ago. Unlikely the same laws are still on the books.
There are several companies currently active that deserve the same treatment.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The same laws are still on the books, actually! We just never use them anymore.
The big one is the Sherman Anti-trust Act.
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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.
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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The fuck was this dude watching/writing down for google to think it was related to terrorism or trafficking????
They probably assumed it was a piracy list. To them, piracy is terrorism and trafficking.
