It is increasingly common to save personal files in the cloud, especially those offered by Google, Apple or Microsoft. This highly standardized practice is really a practice that can be expensive for you. We will explain why you should not upload anything to a third party cloud and build 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 these cloud services (and many others) have a big problem, and that is that you are no longer the owner of the documents.
You should never use a private company’s cloud
We have already discussed some of the most popular cloud services out there. 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 have come together and capacity limited to 15 GB. Once you exceed that number, you can even stop receiving emails to pressure you to pay.
This is not the biggest problem with cloud services. The first thing you should know is that you stop owning the content stored. Google could use those images or documents to train an AI, to sell the information or whatever they please. If by mistake the documents and/or images were deleted, you could not claim anything, since you are accepting in the conditions of use that this could happen.
Recently (a few months ago) many Google Photos users reported image corruption ancient. It is unknown why the images had been corrupted and there was nothing to do. The images had certain defects not present in the original image.
Google, for example, could close tomorrow Photos and we could lose all our pictures stored. It is unlikely that this will happen, but hey, there is Google+, Stadia and other services that, overnight, have disappeared. Even if they give a time to remove the photos, it is a problem for the user, without a doubt.
The best solution is to create a private cloud, something really simple nowadays.
How do you create a private cloud?
Well, this is really very simple. We simply 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 stored photos and documents.
Setting up these systems is easy, although NAS systems really aren’t cheap. We need a solution of at least two bays to be able to generate a RAID 1. This configuration performs a mirror of the data, come on, the data is copied to the two disks. If one fails, we have a backup. If unfortunately, both fail, we have had very bad luck.
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.
