A Reminder That Trusting Everything to Cloud Storage Can Screw You Over

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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%\AppData\Local\Google\DriveFS

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. Unfortunately, any users that added these files to Google Drive and deleted them from their computer (or created them in Drive and never made a backup) are likely very unhappy this week.

How to securely back up your files

So let's talk about a secure backup situation looks like. Say you have an archive of important documents stored on your computer. They only exist on your computer, so if your SSD goes belly-up, those files are toast. So, what can you do? One easy solution is to add a copy of these files to a secondary location, whether that's an external hard drive or cloud storage. Now, these files exist in two places separate from each other. If the SSD breaks, they're in the cloud. If the cloud glitches out, they're on your computer. If the files are super important, making additional backups ensures that should an unlikely disaster strike, you'll still have access. Having files stored in at least two separate locations is usually enough protection for most of us.

But let's say your computer is running out of storage, and you don't want to store the files locally anymore. Don't simply dump them on the cloud or on an external SSD, delete them from your PC, and call it a day—one backup is no backup, after all. You'll want to copy them to another cloud storage or external storage solution to ensure there are at least two copies of those files somewhere.

Be careful with automated cloud storage solutions

Where this starts to get a bit tricky is when using automated cloud storage options like iCloud. Apple makes it easy to connect all your data to iCloud so you never really need to think about constantly backing things up. When you take a photo, it stores on your iPhone and iCloud: When you send a message, same thing.

While you technically have two files in two separate locations, a service like iCloud is tied to your iPhone. If you delete a message from your iPhone, it helpfully deletes that text from the cloud too. If you delete a photo from your library, it gets deleted from iCloud (after a 30 day countdown, anyway). That's by design, and it means your files aren't totally secure against data loss.

What I like to do is rely on cloud storage solutions like iCloud for general backing up purposes (if I lose my iPhone, signing into a new one with my Apple ID brings all my data back), while also making a full backup of my devices to an external source. You can make a backup of your iPhone to iTunes or Finder on your computer, for example, while still having all your data stored in iCloud. That way, if you accidentally delete a thread of messages from your iPhone and iCloud at once, you can restore from your backup to get them back. The same goes for missing photos, notes, contacts, or anything else that gets lost.

While you can rely on full cloud backups for a similar approach, they tend to back up automatically and overwrite the previous backup, so your chances of restoring to a backup that also is missing the data you're looking for is high. The tradeoff with external backups, such as to a computer, is they're less frequent, so you may miss new messages and photos that were added since the last backup. It's a balancing act, but the point is to protect your data in as many ways as possible.

Photos are probably the thing I worry about losing most, and would be devastated if something happened to Apple's servers and I lost every photo I've ever taken with mu iPhone. So on my Mac, I choose the "Download Originals to this Mac" option in Photos' settings under iCloud. That way, my Mac always has a backup of the full-res photos and videos in my library, while my other devices can pull from the cloud as needed. Should something happen to the photos on Apple's end, my Mac has all my media saved securely.

This conversation can get a little in the weeds, especially as you start to focus on specific services. (OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, etc.) But the general rule of thumb for all backups is simple: You need to keep all of your important files stored in at least two separate locations. So long as you have another source to pull your files from, you can safely weather any disaster—digital or physical—that befalls your data.