2019-12-16 Had it with Coud Services

I have truly had it with cloud storage services after me last experience of PCloud. This on the surface seemed like a good service. However it's just been a nightmare. Everything from ba syncs to data loss.

Honestly I've been thinking this for some time, but I'm just gonna buy a couple of portable hard drives and have that as my back-up service.

On the face of it PCloud was decent. Good value for the year, a fairly decent app and the desktop virtual drive seemed to work ok. In fact that was one of the best parts. Could have a virtual drive with up to 2TB of storage available on my work mac. The problem was that when I inspected a couple of folders several of my photos were missing. Not good! Not good at all, the whole point of cloud storage is to have the ability to safely store things like photos. A further problem was that a folder I deleted kept reappearing. What is that all about? I'd delete the folder, both on the desktop and on my mac, then boom. There it was back again. That is a proper pain in the arse. I have no confidence in this service going forwards. All I wanted was a safe place for my files. Especially Photos and Video.

All this after spending nearly two weeks of constant upload to get 300GB into the cloud on my slow home broadband connection.

I tried Smugmug, Flickr, Google Photos, Dropbox, Piwigo. So far nome of them have been perfect. I guess most of these aren't really back-up solutions, so I can't complain.

So I think I'm done with cloud services. Sure a portable hard drive is going to fail, or get lost or destroyed. I'll of course have to have a separate back-up of these files. So far I've tried a lot of options. The only benefit cloud has given me so far is access to my files on my mobile. I think of the times I've needed to access my files from my phone remotely and its so rare. So I think a portable HDD is the way to go for me. 4TB is a nice chunk of storage for £80.