All my saved information is backed up on physical hard drives right here at home.
It doesn't cost a lot to buy a hard drive(s) and keep what you got right here.
I'm not that paranoid that the house will burn down and destroy the stuff.
It doesn't cost a lot to buy a hard drive(s) and keep what you got right here.
I'm not that paranoid that the house will burn down and destroy the stuff.
Store documentation on how to build a fertilizer bomb and watch the black helicopters coming, rightfully so, I would say.
I have nothing sensitive to hide in the cloud, only that I don't like being mined for commercial purposes and targeted with ads. Likely because I recall the times when the Internet was clean of crap and I was happy running Office, reading email, browsing and playing Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein and Leisure Suit Larry all from a 486DX @33MHz with 4Mb of RAM and a 210Mb HDD.
Kay's 'problem' is not unique. Google has been making cloud storage easy, and free, then changing the policy with little notice or help. Many people ended up defaulting to "backup all my pictures". I did. Google had my stuff back to the 20th century. Mostly crap. None I could not live without. I did see the vaguely worded notice about my cloud getting full. I spent an hour trying to find WHAT Google had of mine, and deleted it all off the cloud. I do let it see my cellphone pix (sometimes easiest way to transfer them elsewhere), but delete those every few months.
Go to:
Google Account
You may have to log-in (tho G-login is another persistent virus).
Account storage
Your account storage is shared across Google services, like Gmail and Photos
16% used – 2.43 GB of 15 GB
Manage Storage
2.43 GB of 15 GB used
STORAGE DETAILS
Google Drive ---0.02 GB
Gmail -----------0.91 GB
Google Photos -1.49 GB
There's way too many things to click. However this is new and eye-opening:
Manage your account storage
Also read the Help:
Deleting multiple files at once - Google Drive Community
--with the comments (shift-delete only works in Chrome browser-- they get you coming and going.)
Go to:
Google Account
You may have to log-in (tho G-login is another persistent virus).
Account storage
Your account storage is shared across Google services, like Gmail and Photos
16% used – 2.43 GB of 15 GB
Manage Storage
2.43 GB of 15 GB used
STORAGE DETAILS
Google Drive ---0.02 GB
Gmail -----------0.91 GB
Google Photos -1.49 GB
There's way too many things to click. However this is new and eye-opening:
Manage your account storage
Also read the Help:
Deleting multiple files at once - Google Drive Community
--with the comments (shift-delete only works in Chrome browser-- they get you coming and going.)
And I am grateful to both of you for some of the musical tips. Always good to find new musical directions to explore.
I do not use Microsoft products or Windows, but I had to support it for 25 years. In my case I do sync my data to the Google cloud, but it is encrypted (AES 256) and compressed so I'm not terribly concerned about security. I believe the same methodology is available to Windows users. Compression, especially, helps to stay under the data size limits. Also, it is possible to divide your data locally, with separate folders syncing to separate Google accounts. All of this, of course, requires a modicum of IT expertise. I will say that a server (virtual machine) in the cloud is not a bad idea. In our environment we actually migrate VMs across sites in anticipation of data center maintenance. This, combined with snapshots of entire servers for backup purposes, makes VMs very attractive.
I have that modicum. However Amazon has been sneaking this in for over a decade (back to Picasa) and like the boiled frog, I didn't catch on that easier photo backup and the huge filesizes from newer cameras/phones would squeeze out my 'free' email.
(I don't object to paying for email. But a 13-year free-tease come-on from one of the richest companies on the planet rubs me wrong.)
And even when Amazon has a bad day, they exploit it.
"...Nov 25th we experienced issues in our service where some customers had difficulty in uploading photos ..... please download the latest version of the Amazon Photos app(s) and retry the backup."
So even though I had UN-installed the app from my PC, if I did as they suggest it would be clogging my cloud again. And folks without that modicum may not know how or what or where to shovel-out their cloud. So be "forced" to pay a few $$$ a month to keep their email.
BTW: I remember when 10Megs of email space was very generous. And the day I wrote Justification to be upquotaed to 20Meg. The idea that 15GIGbytes can be cramped seems obscene; OTOH the pic of my brother's bicycle is 7Meg alone. FWIW: my "organizational" gMail account has a 7,000 PETAbyte quota. And they are not supposed to be "robo-reading" that account to guide their ads. (No, my org is not funding 7kPB of storage for lille old me.)
What I like about Google is, if You look up my complete name You got nothing returned.
I like to be invisible. I have all synching disabled including my free 5 TB (office licences) of Onedrive cloud space.
I like to be invisible. I have all synching disabled including my free 5 TB (office licences) of Onedrive cloud space.
Same here. But have distributed copies of all the photos to the young men on thumb drives. We have family photos going back to the early 1900's!
I keep paper copies of all financial stuff. Just learned how important this is when my sister sold her house in Illinois but the bank hadn't released a lien from a HELOC paid off in 2002. She had the physical pay-off letter, a copy of which convinced the financial institution to release the property.
Posting this in Regolith, switched long ago. A retail box of RedHat 6 may still be around here.
Re: connected devices an option is a guest WiFi account with no route to the the home LAN, just gateway access. An inexpensive TP-Link EAP-225 provides simple click and save GUI config. All Google, Windows and home devices now connect as guest. Curious how much more time it takes a Google tablet to signal a successful network connection when no longer allowed to sniff your LAN.
Thx for the heads up on offsite storage. Never considered the industry is that uniformly dishonest these days.
TOR is getting rejected by too many sites. My understanding from playing with QUBES is it's more hardened to withstand external attack and malware than maximize anonymity, hence the Snowden appeal. There's always Whonix.
An easy built-in option Firefox offers to potentially reduce tracking is converting to DNS over HTTPS with Cloudflare as a provider. Search 'DNS' under preferences. Mozilla claim to have negotiated an agreement by which Cloudflare permanently deletes all identifiable browsing history after 24 hours. Can't confirm they adhere but I trust Mozilla much more than my ISP.
Smart, Jack.
But in a way, it's basic common sense.
Yes, it's a bit more inconvenient, keeping papers, in a safe, etc.
Yes it's inconvenient, having to actually write on a piece of paper, and in some cases having it notorized, etc.
But think about this..... all this new technology, storing things on clouds, electronic storage devices - all vunerable to corruption, it's the way society has been "led".... and in a sneaky way, to be more vunerable.
People have become "dependent" on things without thinking down the road.
And dependency isn't a good thing IMO.
Nothing beats a piece of paper locked in a safe.
And yes, I'm aware of someone quoting this and giving me the old "what if the house burns down?" crap.
Registered/certified copies of same can be put in a bank's safety deposit box as well.
There are many flaws to the "new way" of doing some things, I prefer some things stay in "old school" territory. 😉
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Once you are using wifi your privacy is toast today. Do yourself a favor and read about Skyhook and Google, collecting your home wireless devices information.
Google probably still does this, by listening to the wifi traffic when cruising for Google Maps. The wifi traffic between the access point (for example a router) and the wireless clients is not encrypted until the device successfully associates with the access point and the encryption keys are exchanged. Meaning that the wireless client MAC address is sent in clear when a client device scans for a wireless connection. The Google car listens, collects the MACs and associates them with the GPS geographic location of the collecting car, then sends the data home. This way, based on it's unique MAC address, the location of a wireless device can be tracked as good as by GPS, even if your mobile device locator service is turned off.
For cell phone, it works by collecting the traffic between the mobile devices and three towers (with a precisely known position) then triangulating the mobile device position. Not as precise (and likely not real time) as the wifi locator, but certainly almost as good as a GPS based locator.
And no, these are not horror stories from Orwell's 1984, this is happening as I am writing this. Here's a sneak peek Overview | Geolocation API | Google Developers, Skyhook Resources, and Profone MAC Tracker - MAC address location lookup online The data is fore sale, and advertising companies are already aggregating the data and offering the results.
So many companies clamoring to store my files! Apple, Verizon, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Dropbox, etc. So generous of them. I do like Google Doc for a few things, mostly it's darn handy for sharing files to friends or work.
Otherwise I'm like the other old codgers here. Multiple hard drives and paper.
Not long ago I got rid of phone bills dating back to 1991. 😱 Long distance calling was $$$ back then.
Otherwise I'm like the other old codgers here. Multiple hard drives and paper.
Not long ago I got rid of phone bills dating back to 1991. 😱 Long distance calling was $$$ back then.