How and Why to Back Up Your Cloud Data
So you’ve got all your data stored on servers somewhere — your emails at Gmail, photos on Facebook, and passwords in LastPass. But what if one of these services failed and lost your data?
Sure, it’s true that your data is safer in the cloud — Google, Microsoft, and other companies have lost less data than average people have when their hard drives crash — but there’s always a risk.
So you’ve got all your data stored on servers somewhere — your emails at Gmail, photos on Facebook, and passwords in LastPass. But what if one of these services failed and lost your data?
Sure, it’s true that your data is safer in the cloud — Google, Microsoft, and other companies have lost less data than average people have when their hard drives crash — but there’s always a risk.
Isn’t My Cloud Data Safe?
Your emails are probably safer in Gmail or Outlook.com than they are on your hard drive. Service providers generally back up your data to multiple locations. This is more than many users do to protect their personal data — many people tend to ignore backups until they lose their precious data.
But you shouldn’t ignore backups entirely just because your data is in the cloud. Having backups of your data is always a good idea, whether that data is stored in the cloud or on your computer.
Having a backup is a good idea for a few reasons:
- Accidents and Bugs with Syncing: You may accidentally delete or overwrite your data, or a bug with a service could result in your data being erased. For example, you could accidentally delete your bookmarks on one of your Chrome browsers. Or an error with Google Chrome’s bookmark-syncing protocol could result in them being deleted. Either way, you would lose all your bookmarks — unless you created a local backup copy of your bookmarks. If you’ve been building up a collection of bookmarks for years, this could be a big problem.
- Service Crashes: A service itself may experience a problem and lose your data. Luckily, this hasn’t been particularly common. The most high-profile case of a cloud service losing all its customers data occurred when Microsoft’s Sidekick servers lost many customers’ contacts, photos, to-do lists, calendar entries, and other data in 2009. Microsoft, who acquired the Sidekick service along with Danger, who went on to make Microsoft’s terrible Kin phones, did not have any backups of this data. Sidekick owners who trusted Danger (and then Microsoft) to store their photos and other personal data realized how dangerous relying solely on a cloud service could be.
- Attacks: If you’re ever unlucky enough to be the target of attacks, your data may be lost. Matt Honan, who lost much of his data when attackers targeted his accounts by exploiting weaknesses in account recovery mechanisms, lost many personal photos and home videos when the Find My Mac service was used to remotely wipe his Mac’s hard drive. His other data was recovered thanks to help from engineers at Google and Twitter, but who knows how helpful they would have been if it wasn’t such a high-profile attack. Without any local backups, he was completely at the mercy of these companies.
- Deletion Due to Inactivity: Some services delete your data after you haven’t logged in in a while. For example, Microsoft’s Hotmail (now Outlook.com) service deletes all your emails if you haven’t logged in in about eight and a half months. If you’ve switched to another service but still have an old Hotmail account with important email, you may lose it all. If you had those important emails backed up locally, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. Yahoo and Gmail appear to have similar policies, although they may not be enforced as often — stories of Hotmail accounts being wiped have been much more common over the years.
- Switching Services: If you would like to switch from one cloud service to another, you may want to create a local backup and import it into the new service first — assuming both services support that. This helps protect you if a service you use ever shuts down — you can just take your data with you.
Your emails are probably safer in Gmail or Outlook.com than they are on your hard drive. Service providers generally back up your data to multiple locations. This is more than many users do to protect their personal data — many people tend to ignore backups until they lose their precious data.
But you shouldn’t ignore backups entirely just because your data is in the cloud. Having backups of your data is always a good idea, whether that data is stored in the cloud or on your computer.
Having a backup is a good idea for a few reasons:
- Accidents and Bugs with Syncing: You may accidentally delete or overwrite your data, or a bug with a service could result in your data being erased. For example, you could accidentally delete your bookmarks on one of your Chrome browsers. Or an error with Google Chrome’s bookmark-syncing protocol could result in them being deleted. Either way, you would lose all your bookmarks — unless you created a local backup copy of your bookmarks. If you’ve been building up a collection of bookmarks for years, this could be a big problem.
- Service Crashes: A service itself may experience a problem and lose your data. Luckily, this hasn’t been particularly common. The most high-profile case of a cloud service losing all its customers data occurred when Microsoft’s Sidekick servers lost many customers’ contacts, photos, to-do lists, calendar entries, and other data in 2009. Microsoft, who acquired the Sidekick service along with Danger, who went on to make Microsoft’s terrible Kin phones, did not have any backups of this data. Sidekick owners who trusted Danger (and then Microsoft) to store their photos and other personal data realized how dangerous relying solely on a cloud service could be.
- Attacks: If you’re ever unlucky enough to be the target of attacks, your data may be lost. Matt Honan, who lost much of his data when attackers targeted his accounts by exploiting weaknesses in account recovery mechanisms, lost many personal photos and home videos when the Find My Mac service was used to remotely wipe his Mac’s hard drive. His other data was recovered thanks to help from engineers at Google and Twitter, but who knows how helpful they would have been if it wasn’t such a high-profile attack. Without any local backups, he was completely at the mercy of these companies.
- Deletion Due to Inactivity: Some services delete your data after you haven’t logged in in a while. For example, Microsoft’s Hotmail (now Outlook.com) service deletes all your emails if you haven’t logged in in about eight and a half months. If you’ve switched to another service but still have an old Hotmail account with important email, you may lose it all. If you had those important emails backed up locally, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. Yahoo and Gmail appear to have similar policies, although they may not be enforced as often — stories of Hotmail accounts being wiped have been much more common over the years.
- Switching Services: If you would like to switch from one cloud service to another, you may want to create a local backup and import it into the new service first — assuming both services support that. This helps protect you if a service you use ever shuts down — you can just take your data with you.
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