Andrea T. thought that her MacBook was adequately backed up to iCloud, but when she had her computer crashed by a bus, she realized not being backed up even though she paid for it!
When she failed to recover a video project she thought it was backed up to cloud server – iCloud actually run out of space on her 2TB plan – she turned to My Data Recovery Lab for advice, the data recovery eZine and reverse engineering R&D lab.
When you set up any cloud storage, you usually get up to 15GB of storage. You can use that space for your backups, to keep your photos and videos stored, and your documents up to date. If you need more space, you can buy more storage. But in case, like Andrea, when you run out of storage, your device won’t back up to Microsoft, Amazon or IBM cloud which are another good examples, new photos and videos won’t upload (Google Drive), even your text messages won’t stay up to date across your devices in case of iCloud. It appears that just like any other “secondary” storage cloud can fail, too?
Cloud Backup Cost vs. Data Recovery Cost
It can be difficult to decide what kind of storage is right for you. It depends on which operating system you most frequently use, the types of files you use, and a million other factors.
For instance, these days it is “fashionable” that if you spend most of your day under Google umbrella and/or using Chrome, Google Drive would probably be the most convenient but if are based on Windows devices Microsoft’s OneDrive may be ideal for you while in case you are an Apple enthusiast you most likely have iCloud account. However, in case you use a single exFAT formatted external hard drive you can backup or store files with any of these platforms! Convenient and password protected.
Many experts, recommend a 3-2-1 backup strategy, which means that you always have three copies of your data using two different storage devices (cloud and external hard drive) and one copy must be off-site.
In case of example given above cost to recover data in the United States of America from most external hard drives and in case of severe mechanical malfunction is around one thousand US dollars, meaning recovery of data is possible even if you were careless with your external drive and you have not backed up properly. On the other hand cost to have 2TB cloud storage (over the course of 5 years) will cost you around $500. Both estimates are on give or take basis.
Although cloud seems like logical solution in the 21 century and services from Amazon to Kamatera to Microsoft to Google to Adobe to VMware to IBM and others are so easy to use, portable devices sold by Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba appears to be more than good enough for 80% of global population. In the same time, if you question how your decision to make use of cloud-based storage affects the environment, you’re not the only one.
I hope one can notice an irony in the fact that more than one now cloud service provider used to manufacture hard drives. Because back in days, hard drives used to make serious profit. Profit (noun) – money that you make by selling something or from your business, especially the money that remains after you have paid all your business costs. At 10 bucks per month for storage, cost to run a cloud server farm must be extremely low!
Andrea now has WD Passport for Mac just in case when iCloud fails again.
