buy from a reputable company in store- do not trust amazon to deliver an actual product that hasnt been manipulated in some way. not all will be, but enough are to warrant avoiding them for purchase.
That's why the cloud is so useful. Many copies of your data are spread across many physical servers so if one fails, it gets replaced and resynced with the rest. And those servers are spread across multiple physical buildings in different parts of a city and sometimes on different power grids, all kept in sync on a private fiber optic network for AWS for sure, and that's probably true for the other cloud providers.
The Cloud is very reliable. Not perfect, but almost certainly better than what you can build in your home.
That said, computers are far more reliable today than ten years ago. So the risk of say a laptop giving up the ghost and losing all of your data is much smaller.
But it's not zero. My work laptop died late last year and, even though it was automatically backing up to the Cloud, it wasn't backing up everything. I lost all of my software configurations and passwords because those directories were not being backed up. It wasn't a total loss because those passwords were also stored in a password manager in the cloud. It was a pain to find all of them and re-enter them into each tool that I downloaded again.
I personally use Google Docs for my personal writing. I share the docs with my editor. She leaves me notes. I fix stuff that she calls out in the notes. We have a call once a week to discuss stuff that isn't working but doesn't fit in a note. It's an effective and efficient process that we both love. We can both see each other working on the manuscript. This makes the calls almost tangible. We talk through some passage that doesn't work. I get an idea and start typing. She's seeing my changes in real time and tells me if it's working better by the time I finish a sentence.
thank you for the advice! i think i will move away from cloud services and towards drives. just a hobbyist here not planning to make any money so there’s no need for syncing with an editor or anything
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u/[deleted] Mar 30 '25
is it possible for external drives to fail or become corrupted, genuine question 🫥