Photography - Yes, everything is about the "cloud." Then comes the horror

In article ,
Magani wrote:

I've said it before, but it might be worth repeating.
'The Cloud' is merely someone else's computer (however massive that
might
be).
exactly why it's so useful.
I prefer to be in charge of my data, thank you (YMMV).

you can't do anywhere near as good of a job as they can. it's not even
remotely close.

I would hope that my 25 years in IT would count for something. Please
note I
said 'my data', and that others' experiences may be different. I suspect
that you have a different reason to use the cloud, and that's fine, but
my
use case suits me just fine, and it comes more than 'remotely close' to
doing
what I want it to do.
your 25 years in it should have taught you about the risks of data
loss. it clearly has not.

Really? How do you know that? You have zero/zip/nada knowledge of my
abilities or experience.
Your ability to jump to conclusions makes you a prime candidate for the
Olympics.

i'm going by what you wrote.

one match and you'll be singing a very different tune.

Gave up smoking years ago. Mother always said not to play with matches.
Have you never heard of 'off-site' backups?

have you ever heard of the california wildfires, where multiple towns
were turned to ash? or the hurricanes that hit texas and florida, which
caused massive flooding? or the deep freeze in texas this past year,
where water pipes froze and then flooded and destroyed people's homes?

unless your offsite backups are at a substantial distance *and* online
with redundant power, you are at risk for data loss.

what you call 'someone else's computer' is actually multiple redundant
data centers run by people whose job is to guarantee data integrity and
reliability.

Spot on! I totally agree.

yet you argue anyway.

But it doesn't belong to you or me, and neither do
we have any control of it nor know how it's run.. I prefer to look after my
own, thank you.

false. you have *full* control over your data.

many of the cloud services offer 11 9s of redundancy, something you
cannot possibly come close without a *lot* of time and money.

Again, what do you know of my financial position? Maybe I'm a slightly nutty
billionaire.

i'm pretty sure you don't have anywhere close to the resources that
amazon, apple, google, microsoft, etc. have, or even the smaller cloud
providers.

I don't need '11 9s' (and you only need 5 copies to achieve
this). Three data sets in three different locations are enough for me.

are they all online and continually kept in sync without any user
interaction? if not, you don't have three data sets and you are
guaranteeing data loss.

amazon, for example, has data centers scattered across the planet. it
would take the total destruction of earth to lose data in all of them,
at which point it no longer matters.

Again, I totally agree.

yet you argue anyway.

However, AWS (part of Amazon) is under an obligation
to share its data with various US Govt agencies when asked (and hence
presumably Five Eyes). I prefer to keep mine private.

that requires a valid subpoena, in which case you have *much* bigger
problems to worry about.

there's also this thing called encryption. they're not going to get
very far.

you also don't need to use amazon. there are many others, some of whom
will *not* respond to requests from the usa government.