Can I rely on my cloud services backups. Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. Here's the question.
"I keep all my data in the cloud,
which is backed up automatically by the provider writer.
Is that enough?"
Nope, probably not even close.
It's very tempting to realize that, yes,
online services, of course they back up their equipment.
Of course they back up your data.
But here's the catch.
The backups that they create are for their use, not yours.
So like I said, all cloud services have backups.
I'll just use OneDrive as an example, guaranteed that all of the data that you
place in OneDrive is being backed up magically behind the scenes.
And in fact, it may even be getting restored as needs come up.
Hard drives fail and they fail for us,
and they fail in data centers, and they fail in Microsoft data centers.
They have systems built and in place to account for that fact.
One of the pieces of what they've built up is a backup strategy that says, yeah,
worst case, we've got the data on backup that we can restore if necessary.
But there is no interface.
There is no provision for them to access those backups at your request.
Again, those backups are there to protect them, not you, from their perspective.
And in fact, I'm sure that if you take
a look at the terms and conditions or the acceptable use policy or whatever it
was you agreed to when you signed up for their service,
they probably put the responsibility for backing up clearly on your shoulders.
The way that I like to think of it is that cloud services like Onedrive or Dropbox
or any of the other different ways you can store data on someone else's computer,
they're one place.
So like all of Onedrive with all of its backups, that's one place.
If that one place goes away, for example,
you lose access to your OneDrive account backups by Microsoft or not.
It's all gone. You can't get to it.
You need a backup.
You need a second place.
Remember, if it's only in one place, it's not backed up.
If it's only in Onedrive, it's not backed up.
That's the rule of thumb.
Now, there are a couple of I'll just call it exceptions.
They could use their backups as part of a customer facing backup solution.
To be clear, I am not aware of any service that does this.
They could. It seems like an interesting
value add, but I've not run into any that do.
The other is a little bit more ominous, and that is that it seems possible
that the cloud provider, whomever it is, could be required to recover something
from a backup if faced with a court order or whatever other legal proceedings are
appropriate for the jurisdictions that are involved.
So, for example,
if the police came and they needed a specific file out of a backup
that you've since deleted, potentially they could go back and force
Microsoft or Whomever to retrieve that file from their backups again.
I've also never heard of this happening,
but it seems a more likely case that there would be scenarios where it could.
So how do you tell if there's a backup you could use or not?
It's actually pretty easy.
Test it. Literally create a file, do something to it.
Give whatever amount of time is required
for that to be backed up, whether it be an hour, a week, a month, whatever.
Delete the file, move it somewhere else.
If it's an important file, I wouldn't use an important file for this.
But delete the file from your cloud service.
Now, using only the cloud service and not
your own backups, try and recover the file.
You may be able to they're not quite
backups, but there are features in OneDrive and Dropbox that are kind
of a recycle bin or a file history type approach.
You may be able to recover the file.
That might be enough.
On the other hand, if you were to lose your account,
you lose your OneDrive account or lose your Dropbox account.
You really don't have any recourse.
You will not have found a way to get your
file back without even having the account available to you.
Never assume that there is a backup unless it's something that you've made.
If you're using email at an online
provider, especially a free one, make sure to back it up.
If your photos are all online, make sure to back them up somewhere else.
If your music is all stored online, download backup copies.
If your data is stored only in a single
cloud service, make copies before it's too late.
And of course, if, like me,
you maintain websites or have any other kind of online presence,
make sure that you have a way to back all of that up should the worst happen.
I've seen the worst happen, and it's not pretty if there's no back up
now, there is one thing that I very much want to clarify,
and that is that cloud services like Dropbox and others,
they're fine for backups, but you should not rely on their backups.
It's the difference between
making a backup of your own and choosing
to put it on the cloud in addition to wherever you have your data
versus putting your data in the cloud and assuming that it's been backed up.
I strongly recommend that, yes, using tools like OneDrive and Dropbox
and so forth to make additional copies of your data in the cloud.
Wonderful idea.
I do it myself,
but putting your data in something like OneDrive or Dropbox and then assuming
that that's the only place it needs to be, that's a big mistake.
The bottom line here is that backups you create are good backups.
You assume definitely not.
I hope that's helpful.
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I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com thanks for watching.