Post
by stam » Mon Jul 26, 2021 11:15 am
We all know physical drives are fine until they fail. We all know cloud drives are fine until the service folds.
With the latter, picking a large, reputable service that is very unlikely to go under pretty much guarantees data integrity, for as long as it's likely to be relevant anyway. The links posted above about supposed problems with data storage are nonsense - how many users actually lost data?
While physical drives have a role - they are accessible offline, quicker data access - they are never guaranteed to be error-free or even keep working.
Over the years i've accumulated several drives that just make clicking noises when trying to load them - data lost forever. My worst disaster was when my laptop was stolen, and by the time i got a new one i discovered that all 3 of my backup drives had failed as well. All my papers, research, presentations, > 10,000 pictures lost forever (this was before the 'cloud' era).
Unless you have a raid setup, where data is mirrored you cannot guarantee data integrity with physical drives (and if you do have a raid setup, kudos!)
This is the reason i view any long term storage as cloud-only - i've had too many catastrophic physical drive failures to trust any long term storage to physical devices...