It is increasingly common to save personal files in the cloud, especially those offered by Google, Apple or Microsoft. This very standardized practice is really a practice that can cost you dearly. We will tell you why you don’t have to upload anything to a third-party cloud and create your own cloud.
Currently the easiest thing on Android is to upload photos to Google Photos and documents to Drive, and on Apple we have iCloud. On the other hand, Microsoft offers the OneDrive cloud. All of these cloud services (and many more) have one big problem, and that is that you no longer own the documents.
You should never use a private company’s cloud
We have already discussed some of the most popular cloud services. While these services are a great temporary solution, relying on these services is a bad idea. For example, a few years ago Google decided to limit the number of images you could upload to Photos. Now Google Photos and Drive got together and capacity limited to 15 GB. Once you go over that number, you can even stop receiving emails urging you to pay.
That’s not the biggest problem with cloud services. The first thing you need to know is that you cease to own the content stored. Google could use these images or these documents to train an AI, to sell the information or whatever it pleases. If by mistake the documents and/or images have been deleted, you will not be able to claim anything, since you accept in the conditions of use that this can happen.
Recently (a few months ago), many Google Photos users reported a corrupt image old. It is not known why the images had been corrupted and there was nothing to do. The images had some flaws not present in the original image.
Google, for example, could close tomorrow Photos and we could lose all our photos stored. That’s unlikely to happen, but hey, there’s Google+, Stadia, and other services that disappeared overnight. Even if they give a time to delete the photos, it is a problem for the user, no doubt.
The best solution is to create a private cloud, which is very simple these days.
How to create a private cloud?
Well, it’s really quite simple. We just need a Synology NAS, for example, to have a private cloud. They offer an application similar to Google Photos that allows us to upload photos directly, without doing anything. Thus, we will be owners at all times of the photos and documents stored.
Setting up these systems is easy, although NAS systems really aren’t cheap. You need a solution of at least two bays to be able to generate a RAID 1. This configuration mirrors the data, come on, the data is copied to both disks. If one fails, we have a backup. If unfortunately both fail, we have been very unlucky.
I have to say that I personally have one of these NAS systems in RAID 1 configuration and also an external hard drive for security. Come on, I have important documents in three storage units to avoid losing data.
