Cloud Backup… Its Cloudy

People are always approaching me with the same basic question. If I am now trusting all of my irreplaceable family data (family photos, digital home movies, spreadsheets, etc) to one computer what do I do if something happens to it?

The answer comes on three layers. First, you can manually back it up or you could take a plunge into the cloud.

That’s fine and good for something like a simple hardware failure, but what about the case of catastrophic failure such as flood or a fire? Most of the talk has revolved around cloud storage.

Cloud backup has it’s pluses and it’s minuses. First of all, it’s slow. Even with today’s broadband capabilities found in many households, upload speeds are still relatively slow. According to ofcom the national average upload speed is a mere 230kbps.

Second, it can be costly and have recurring fees. I have all of my family photos stored online and pay around £4/month in storage and monthly access fees. I can’t even imagine how expensive it would be to also store all of my music and videos there (or how long it would take to transfer).

Third, many people take issue with storing personal data in the cloud, sure the data is encrypted, but it’s still stored on someone else’s system. Who knows when the day will come that some hacker breaks in and looks at photos of me drunk at a party. I don’t see this happening any time soon, but some people do. Of course, I don’t think the moon landing was fake and some people do (you know who you are).

Alex