Best Cloud Storage

Is this the best rate out there? Is it secure?

Got to back up the backups 😀👍

Believe it's Backblaze...Blackblaze is an African American Super Hero.

An interesting side-note...
A few weeks ago huge parts of the net were functionally dead for a while. Worldwide.
This was a somehow frightening message for those who know, what the internet should be like and is intended to function. Because this major failure was caused by 1 company.
The biggest commercial player in the game is amazon when it comes to cloud services. A lot of really huge companies rely their businesses on it.
They had a major malfunction in their cloud services system and huge parts of the net were dead.
The major misconception with cloud services is, that the data would be in a safer place than at home. That these were saved redundantly and therefore nothing can be lost.
Cloud sounds like "heaven" no harm so easy. A marketing genius, whoever came with this word for data storage.
It is hardware like everywhere else. But if somethings goes wrong, you can not carry your harddisk to a forensic IT specialist...you don't even have the key to the house, where it is and even if you had it, you would not know where it is, and there would be nobody who can tell you for sure....
And of course your data is much more interesting for abuse and fraud and theft when it is in the cloud with petabytes of other personal and business files and information. Data are money. Accounts and personal information is money. If i would be a professional computer criminal, i would never bother breaking into your house for your harddisks or NAS. But how often did you hear of millions and millions of leaked email accounts (nearly every big provider/carrier has been hacked once), server sabotage (Sony?), and even bank account information. 3 dozen russian hackers can break in parallel into multiple banking systems and steal 130,000,000 EUR. They did not long time ago. And it is astonishingly easy, believe it or not. Clever, but i guess you think the biggest banks are clever, too, when it comes to huge amounts of money. There is always a way, and the standard "absolutely safe" cash card number system of german banking systems had been decrypted by a 14 year old, and he told the media it was not too hard. I think i remember it took him a few weeks of time (after school and homework). The "safe" finger print verification that had been presented one or two decades ago had been tricked before it even really reached the consumer market i guess it took about two weeks to find out how to recreate someones fingerprint with superglue and a bit of graphit or whatever. Super easy.
Data in the cloud is on hardware, like at home, but you pay for it, you do not know, where they are, the service can be shut down by governments, criminals, nature, bad business practices, ...

I know it has been discussed earlier and of course i used cloud services. For sharing and exchange. For redundant storage of non-sensible or encrypted data that nobody would bother to decrypt without knowing it really pays off...
That is not paranoid at all. It is realistic. I had seen *months* of complete financial data of a company with more than 400 POS' been lost. A company that makes nearly 1,000,000,000 Eur in sales per anno. Absolutely unbelievable, but i worked in their IT and i still know how they had to struggle with the "guessed" taxes. can be a very uncomfortable experience for everyone who had such a problem once when dealing with european tax authorities when self-employed...
In another company that was much, much bigger, and is high tech specialized, *everything relies on virtual servers and storage. A chaos that tries to do the job while those who really smart try to figure out why the heck anything at all can function under these circumstances...

Just to remind you to not rely on cloud storage only if you have to make a living from the data you store in the cloud.....
My 0.05 EUR, YMMV....

The cloud is the perfect backup to your backup!
As a primary it's fraught with perils, with the prospect of net neutrality disappearing imagine your IP provider cutting the speed of your cloud because it's not there faveorite.

As mentioned only use cloud storage as an offline backup of your backup.
To use it as your primary storage or sole archive storage is going to eventually bite you on your ass.

Be it a system failure, hackers or the cloud service gets bought out by Goldman Sachs and they start charging you $500 per month (to do God's work) and end up claiming copyright on your material and license your stuff out to third parties without paying you.

When discussing cloud infrastructure, always replace the word "cloud" with the words "someone else's computer", because that's all it is




If the only copy of your data is in cloud storage, you're doing it wrong. That's true of any critical data that only exists in one place.

Having your files on a backup drive next to your computer isn't a backup. If your house burns, your computer and the backup both burn. The backup needs to be in its own location to actually be a safe backup.

I use multiple WD Elements and WD Passport external USB drives to backup after each session. One of them is amost all the time in the bag i carry with me always, and i make a backup of the backup every time i am at my brothers place, so this is my external backup in another place. It is near to impossible i lose more than one session ever, no matter if one drive goes faulty, a place burns down, i get robbed, whatever....
Cloud services for sharing or short time storage and exchange...