combatentropy
Veteran
It's unlimited only for 16-megapixel photos and 1080p videos. Bigger ones count against your storage limit. Plus it doesn't look like you can store RAW.
If that doesn't turn you off, I think that the cloud is like an airplane and your hard drive is like driving a car. One feels more dangerous, you're not in control, but it's actually safer. One feels safer, you're more in control, but you're actually more likely to die.
Keeping up your own back-up system is hard, even for geeks. What if your hard drive fails? What if your computer catches a virus? What if your house is burglarized, tornadoed, or burns to the ground? Do you keep a back-up off site? How often is it made?
My files are backed up to the cloud automatically, effortlessly. The mystical people in the land of Oz make copies and store them in different data centers in different cities. They have gates, guards, and retina scanners. Their servers don't run Windows but some stripped-down form of Linux. The data on the hard drives is encrypted. The hard drives, when thrown out, are physically shredded.
Something else to consider is that these companies' names are on the line. If a big break-in happens or word leaks that the company misused its data, the damage to the company's reputation and bottom line could be catastrophic, as people flock to Company B or go back to home-made solutions. And damage to reputation takes years to repair, if you can even do it. If they only do what they say they're going to do with my data, I'm fine, which is that they're going to let a robot peruse my data, to find patterns, so that another robot on another website can serve me ads or whatever that I might find more interesting.
If by some chance some weirdo breaks in and starts thumbing through files, there are millions of users that he might hit first, simply by virtue of the cloud service's number of customers. And once he finds my files, he finds --- what? The worst thing I can think of is that he finds something that lets him break into my bank website. But my bank website guarantees to repay for me for money lost to break-ins, like my credit card promises not to hold me liable for charges by someone who steals it.
I don't work for Google, and I'm not saying that you should store such-and-such on it. I'm saying that I've weighed the pros and cons, and for a lot of things I trust a few, well-established companies to keep them for me.
If that doesn't turn you off, I think that the cloud is like an airplane and your hard drive is like driving a car. One feels more dangerous, you're not in control, but it's actually safer. One feels safer, you're more in control, but you're actually more likely to die.
Keeping up your own back-up system is hard, even for geeks. What if your hard drive fails? What if your computer catches a virus? What if your house is burglarized, tornadoed, or burns to the ground? Do you keep a back-up off site? How often is it made?
My files are backed up to the cloud automatically, effortlessly. The mystical people in the land of Oz make copies and store them in different data centers in different cities. They have gates, guards, and retina scanners. Their servers don't run Windows but some stripped-down form of Linux. The data on the hard drives is encrypted. The hard drives, when thrown out, are physically shredded.
Something else to consider is that these companies' names are on the line. If a big break-in happens or word leaks that the company misused its data, the damage to the company's reputation and bottom line could be catastrophic, as people flock to Company B or go back to home-made solutions. And damage to reputation takes years to repair, if you can even do it. If they only do what they say they're going to do with my data, I'm fine, which is that they're going to let a robot peruse my data, to find patterns, so that another robot on another website can serve me ads or whatever that I might find more interesting.
If by some chance some weirdo breaks in and starts thumbing through files, there are millions of users that he might hit first, simply by virtue of the cloud service's number of customers. And once he finds my files, he finds --- what? The worst thing I can think of is that he finds something that lets him break into my bank website. But my bank website guarantees to repay for me for money lost to break-ins, like my credit card promises not to hold me liable for charges by someone who steals it.
I don't work for Google, and I'm not saying that you should store such-and-such on it. I'm saying that I've weighed the pros and cons, and for a lot of things I trust a few, well-established companies to keep them for me.
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