In light of the article linked in the first post, I’ve decided to limit my online visibility severely again. This is a long pattern with me of self-censorship of what I write on the internet, ever since I realized in the late 90’s that the very nature of how the lower OSI layers work meant that there can be no online privacy. (Packets sent over the internet include the sender’s and the destination’s IP address.)
I can be a little more lenient with forum posts; I need to communicate with my peers, but I always watch what I say when I post.
Most emails are now archived in DT, Apple Photos have been reduced to 65 from 528. Corporate sync services are treated as device data transfer services only, with contents removed to local storage as soon as practicable. EDIT: I’m using webDAV from my email provider, but at some point to be consistent, I’m going to have to self-host my own webDAV instance, which I dread doing.
Additional content added to the original post:
I guess I’m getting pessimistic the more I read cloud storage ToC’s, but it sure looks like they aren’t a safe place to store digital content, especially if you mix your created content with copies of other people’s content from the web. Why would a user store copies of other people’s content from the web? Because the web is ephemeral and content can at any time be inaccessible for whatever reason, and sometimes one may not have internet access. Bookmarks aren’t always sufficient.
Also, there is the chance that one piece of content might be deemed “inappropriate” by the owner of the cloud sync service, and they might, without redress, delete your entire account, and thence, a good chunk of your digital life. This has happened recently, and it will happen again.
I wanted to store my music into a sync service, for backup, and not sync it to a local device. The more I read, the more I learned that I just couldn’t justify doing it from a legal basis, even though I’d never share copyrighted information with anyone else. I know better. Even with an end to end encrypted zero knowledge service like MEGA, it isn’t legally possible. This may seem far-fetched and I am not a lawyer, but it feels like companies have to mandate the ability to file share, so that the authorities can prohibit cloud storage services from storing copyrighted information there. At the extreme, who in authority wants the dark web?
And then there is the fact that sync is always online and active. The sync service online recycle bin might be emptied inadvertently or might not work reliably. I had this happen to a client of mine in the past month. Any sync service should never be considered as the sole fount of one’s files, even if there is a reliably synced local copy on a device one owns themselves. The sync service can always delete files from that local copy.
I will assert that backup is offline and disconnected except at the time of backup. NAS systems, unless they can be dismounted, are still online and thus, somewhat vulnerable. (I’m going to get flamed on this last point; I know I am. Teach me on alternative ways to think about NAS systems.) I still think that even NAS systems need backups. OTOH, I’m not a data hoarder, far from it, but I have read about data hoarders and it might be very impractical to have a backup of everything.