The Dangers of Relying Solely on Cloud Storage

An ominous, smoky black cloud against a gray sky

So much of our digital lives now exist solely in the cloud. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft make it all too easy to upload our important files to cloud storage from the moment we set up our devices.

On one hand, that’s a good thing: If something happens to your phone, tablet, or laptop, that doesn’t mean you lose all your messages, photos, and documents—assuming all that info is properly backed up to the cloud. When you get your device fixed or replaced, you can sign back into your account and pull all that data down from the cloud without losing anything in the transition. In fact, I suspect that our collective data has never been more secured than it is today, thanks to the abundance and simplicity of cloud storage.

However, that’s not to say that our backup situation is perfect—far from it. Relying solely on the cloud for data storage can have disastrous consequences.

Google recently lost up to six months’ worth of data for some Drive users.

You can see those consequences in play this week: Unfortunately, some Google Drive users are reporting missing files dating back to May 2023. Google has publicly acknowledged the issue and is investigating, but that investigation won’t necessarily bring back any of the files that have vanished from these users’ Google Drive accounts. (I guess they’d just have to take comfort in knowing that Google figured out why it happened?)

For your protection, one Google Drive team member did warn users not to click disconnect account on Google Drive for desktop, and to avoid deleting or moving data in the following folders:

  • Windows: %USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalGoogleDriveFS

  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS 

…but that’s not exactly a big comfort.

To be clear, this event is not common. Companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft host a lot of data from millions, if not billions, of users, without regularly losing any of it. Still, if it can happen once, it can happen again. Perhaps Apple announces next year that iCloud had an issue, and three months worth of photo uploads are now gone. Maybe Microsoft loses OneDrive user’s data next October. You can’t assume these services will be infallible forever.

That isn’t to say don’t use them. I use iCloud for just about everything I do in the Apple ecosystem. However, for anything important, you need to make sure you have a secondary backup in case something goes wrong.

That’s what’s likely playing out with these affected Google Drive users right now: Some of them will have used their Google Drive accounts as a secondary backup for their files, keeping another backup of them stored on a hard drive or another cloud service. They’ll be frustrated, but not panicked, as the lost files will still be in this alternate location.

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