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Two is one, one is none, and three's a spare. I run multiple backup solutions on my data because I do not want to lose a bit if any one of them breaks.
For phones, I think you're pretty much stuck with Google or Apple owning your data. That's a large vulnerable surface of your Google or Apple account, so ensuring you set up 2FA (and not via phone number since those can be easily spoofed). I use a hardware key. I'll have to reassess if I ever decide I'd like to start committing felonies, because both of those companies share your data pretty freely when there's a legitimate request from law enforcement. That'll include GPS and location data, and "person who always brings their phone with them decided to leave it at home on the night in question" is very easy to tell from the records. Also important not to google incriminating things. The military uses cell phones a lot when targeting bad guys. Most of them had good OPSEC but their wives never did. My military career was mostly in intelligence, and being resistant to the techniques we used is just not practical for anyone who doesn't believe their life or freedom is in serious jeopardy from the US government (ala Snowden).
At home I'm using a ZFS array to protect against hard drive failure and bit rot. I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire. I keep my important stuff on Google Drive mirrored to my ZFS array. I have a VeraCrypt file that holds anything I want to backup but not let Google read. Examples of things that someone might not want Google to read include TOR accounts and bookmarks, "hacking" tools and scripts that have been used in violation of the CFAA, and cryptocurrency keys. Not that I have any of those.
Having seen how Google handles data privacy and security from the inside, I'm not at all worried about their cloud integration from a security perspective. I trust Apple and Microsoft similarly. The company is not going to blackmail you with your nudes or leak your social security number, and employees can't access those things on your account without getting caught. The company will cooperate with any and every government if they feel the request is legitimate, as I mentioned. I keep that in mind, but don't actually want to join up with the Proud Boys or kidnap the governor of Michigan, so I'm comfortable keeping my files with them. I am quite comfortable keeping my SSN and bank account information on my Google because I have the hardware 2FA key (and no other 2FA allowed) to protect against account takeover. The government and law enforcement can already get my SSN and bank account info if they want them. And if Google deletes my account, no biggie because I have a local copy of everything.
I moved my email off gmail and don't have a plan for email backups yet. Another TODO.
In terms of very basic functionality, I was pleasantly surprised to find that AWS' basic command line interface supports something at least comparable to rsync, and setting up my own backups for this sort of data was pretty trivial. If you want to encrypt it locally (server-side is an option, but wouldn't really work with my threat model), that might get a bit more complicated, but I was originally expecting it to require actually writing scripts.
Ooh, strong point in favor of AWS. If you don't mind sharing, what AWS storage type are you using? What's your data size, rate, and cost?
I mostly use it as an offsite backup for unchanging things like family photos and such (a few hundred gigabytes total), not as primarily-accessible storage, so I use
STANDARD_IAwhich is a bit more expensive to read. I think I've determined that it'll cost an extra month or two to actually pull the entire backup were that ever necessary, but at the scale in question that's still pretty reasonable. Cost is somewhere around $100/year.I did do some finagling on the bucket setup and access token permissions to make the contents versioned (can't be completely overwritten) and prevent my CLI instance from deleting things accidentally.
From what I hear, the AWS S3 API is basically the same as many of its competitors (dunno about the CLI tool), and I have friends that swear by BackBlaze (which is free to retrieve). I figure if AWS has much more incentive to worry about bit-rot than an HDD in the closet, and if they starts losing data we're probably in a shooting war or something catastrophic.
On the other hand, I've had family members burned by storing things in bank safe deposit boxes in the past because of issues at the bank, while their houses were safe. Could have been the other way around, sure, but with digital data it's easy enough to make copies.
Great info. Thanks for sharing!
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This seems reasonable. My threat model is a little broader than yours -- the question of 'what happens if something I've already done and isn't controversial today becomes a felony', possibly without me knowing or having prior notice, is a little more prominent in my mind, as a not-straight furry who follows a lot of CTRLPew stuff -- but for a lot of people (and, honestly, even my own use case) there's reasonable questions about where this falls into paranoia.
Yeah, I feel like I recently saw a US court case where someone was found guilty for breaking a law that wasn't a law when they committed the acts. I can't find it now for the life of me.
There are plenty of not-straight furries at Google, so if there's a culture/legal shift I would expect Google (and other FAANG companies) to fight tooth and nail (heh) against court orders to reveal incriminating stuff related to that. For the CTRLPew stuff, yeah, I'd back up those files and notes in a way the cloud providers can't see them. The VeraCrypt file is annoying because I have to upload the whole thing when any small part of it changes, but I'm not sure there's a better solution. I have zero trust in any company's claims of zero-knowledge, unbreakable encryption, or resistance to government seizure.
The rules for ex post facto laws are complex and more than a little arbitrary: the courts have basically allowed everything and anything to pass muster in civil contexts, criminal laws which are 'merely' regulatory in contrast to punitive ones get a pass, and for kinda goofy historical reasons only a very small subset of process changes specific to testimony or rules of evidence are really taken seriously.
There's definitely stuff that would fall into that category, sometimes even stuff that would heavily squick out normies, but I'd caution against overestimating solidarity of any group. Even outside of cases that ultimately revolve around stupid interpersonal shit, there's a long-standing interest in reporting certain classes of bad actors when they're exposed through the fandom. That's not even always necessarily wrong, but neither code nor major names in the fandom notice the difference between Laws I Like versus Potential Laws I Don't.
As a trivial and probably-not-too-controversial here example, were federal law changed such that use of uncleared AI image generation models were criminal copyright infringement, I'm very skeptical that a lot of the mainstream fandom or even its Google-specific employee base would be willing to bend over backwards to protect customers from overbroad warrants in the way that they would over, say, sex toy sales receipts or did over normal copyright infringement.
I don't think it's likely we'll see a massive swing back (zero isn't a probability, though) on the more standard homosexuality, or even just Braeburned- or Rukis-level stuff, but I'm old enough to have seen a number of new taboos established around the borders or less common tastes.
Yeah, lots of agreement there. Cryptomator is supposed to be pretty decent as per-file encryption goes, but their security audit situation is nowhere near as robust as VeraCrypt's and the user experience is Not Great Bob (though better than using GPG raw!), and per-file encryption unavoidably leaks some metadata. Bulk-mounting a variety of smaller veracrypt volumes can kinda work as a compromise, but it's definitely not supported well by the VeraCrypt GUI, acts inconsistently if you're working with volumes rather than files, most workarounds risk leaking password info, so on. Dunno of any approaches that are better.
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Even on your last point, you could use something like Tresorit where they are at least happy to not proactively police you, even if they could, unlike Google which takes initiative to search your files for wrongthink. Why bother with Google Drive? There are many storage providers out there without as much oversight.
Yeah, maybe I should. Part of it is also inertia since I have been pretty invested in Google infrastructure since their early days. But I also don't think Google actively polices your Drive files except for CSAM and people sharing movies through Drive. Having been on the inside, I just don't think there's that much active policing by Google of the sorts of wrongthink I participate in.
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Have you considered keeping a periodically-updated backup in the trunk of your car?
I did that with a second TitanKey for a while. Cars have wild temperature swings and aren't great for storing electronics, so I ultimately moved it to a safety deposit box with a small local bank. It also turns out that if something requires me to do things infrequently but consistently, I usually end up forgetting and failing to do it. So for me, right now, I would rather pay money than time for a backup solution.
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I appreciate the rundown on your file storage strategy, this sounds thorough and fair. I especially like your strategy of using cloud storage and your local storage pool as redundant backups of each other. That seems to me to be a judicious use of cloud storage, while maintaining personal autonomy and avoiding lock-in. I'm not anti-cloud, but I do think being smart with how you use it is the right call. This goes for autonomy as well as cost; I have tens of thousands of family photos stretching back decades, and it became pretty clear to me that any cloud photo provider would cost an insane amount of money to store all this uncompressed.
TheMotte, weirdly, is one place on the internet I go where people are strongly in favor of personal cloud vs. the build-your-own old-school hacker mentality. Then again, the only other places I go on the internet are open source forums, where that mentality is very strong. I'm guessing since the rationalist community drew so heavily from FAANG employees, and the motte drew so heavily from the rationalist community, we have a lot of people who place a great deal of trust in FAANG. It's not so much that I don't think they take security seriously, and more that I think their incentives are misaligned with people's data autonomy. Like when Google decided to make Google Photos not unlimited any more, with it also being somewhat difficult to do a mass-export of your original, full-quality photo data. And Google's usually not too bad with making takeout possible, so that made a lot of people pretty mad.
We put a lot of our lives on our computers, I think having control over them and the ability to make our own choices with how we use and manipulate our thoughts and memories is important. It's not the government I'm worried about -- like you say, they can get whatever they want if they really want to -- but the profit motive, and the random account deletions for inscrutable reasons. Enshittification is real. That's why I really respect your balanced approach and my guess is your strategy is that of the majority among home server enthusiasts. Keep us informed on what you decide for your ZFS backups, I've been looking for a place to store compressed file backups.
That's true, but I'm just not convinced that it's rational to swear off their services because of that alone. It's a mutually beneficial, slightly adversarial economic relationship, like everything in Capitalism. I do think the math is different for people who are breaking the law or actively working on cybersecurity stuff, but what I see most often (IRL) is "Google/FAANG bad!" grunting by people who have huge security vulnerabilities and data leakage through other methods. Maybe that's sampling bias, since my social circles don't include anyone who's been to DEF CON.
My understanding of this change was that your photos now count against your Google account's storage limits, shared with Google Drive, gMail, and all other Google services. If you have a lot of full quality photos and run out of space, you can pay for more storage or compress them. That seems completely reasonable to me. I haven't heard about difficulties in using Google Takeout. I do so occasionally and it's always been straightforward. Are complaints about that change just some combination of "free stuff isn't free anymore" and "I hate Google", or is there something legitimate there?
Hard agree. Time has shown that Stallman was right. I'm glad we can still compile our own OSs from source. In a lot of other areas, I think the battle is lost. I'm living and teaching my kids to deal with the world we're in, and I don't think abstinence-only can work if you want to have a healthy social life. I won't be the guy who refuses to open the menu from a QR code when out to dinner with friends.
The complaints about Takeout may have been overblown. I recall this hacker news thread about the problem, but people there are disagreeing with each other about the issue, and I've never personally used Google Photos so I don't know who to believe. Maybe there was something about EXIF data being stripped? And I recall there was also something about it being difficult to mass delete photos too, making it hard to get back under your storage limit without just wiping everything? That may also have been exaggerated, I don't know. Fair enough, I rescind that part of my description.
But while I understand why they did it, Google going from "you can upload unlimited photos!" to "your photos count against your limited storage quota" does illustrate that you're at the mercy of the provider when you use cloud services, and you need to have a plan for what to do if your prayers they do not alter the deal further ultimately fail.
I don't think it's so much that people think they're bad for that sole reason, and more that I think there are a lot of little reasons why people don't trust them to act in their best interests in the long term. I wouldn't advise anyone to swear off all big tech services without exception, but moreso to be judicious in how they use them and have an exit plan. The corporate version of this is "multi-cloud" or "hybrid-cloud," and it's growing for the same reasons I think people ought to carefully consider their consumer cloud strategy. It certainly saved Unisuper's skin in the story from the OP!
Google, in particular, I am just incredibly skeptical of because of their long history of killing off services people loved due to the management culture that disincentivizes maintaining existing products. I don't trust that anything Google does for consumers will exist in 10 years, except Search (though that one looks more concerning every day), GMail, YouTube, and Drive/Docs (because of its enterprise use). And hence those are the only Google services I use!
Further, I deactivated my Facebook account a long time ago not because of privacy concerns (though I have them) but because they enshittified the algorithm and force-fed me a bunch of toxoplasmosis-filled viral content that just made me angry, instead of the updates from friends and family I signed up to follow. They made the product worse to the point where the tradeoff in the data and attention I was giving them wasn't worth it, so I stopped using it.
Personally, of course, I love self-hosting things. But I certainly don't expect others to share in my self-hosting dreams, and I use third-party and cloud services to share data and communicate with other people.
I think there's an ideal balance to be struck with self-hosting, where you self-host services that are largely self-focused (personal notes, photo libraries, etc) and then judiciously use other services -- yes, even ones with terrible privacy practices! -- to mindfully share some of that data with others. The point is to be mindful, judicious, and self-aware of the choices you make, and weigh costs and benefits. Trying to get your friend to create a login for your nextcloud is decidedly not mindful, judicious, or self-aware, and when people talk about folks like that I make this face. Actually, publishing personal web services on the open internet just seems like an incredibly terrible idea to me, except in very specific circumstances.
The threat model for why people should consider self-hosting is decidedly not privacy from the government, which is a fool's errand. Nor is it, ultimately, privacy from data aggregation, which is almost certainly unavoidable, although I maintain it is a morally respectable stance to try to minimize your personal contribution to it, just as a vegetarian might choose to minimize their consumption of animal products because they oppose factory farming.
The point of self-hosting, for me, is not really about privacy but about control. The dream of the personal computer revolution was putting the power of computing in the hands of the everyday person, giving them autonomy over their own computing to use according to their wishes. I see self-hosting as an evolution of that dream.
People refusing to open menus from QR codes is another confused Nick Young moment for me. That seems to be a clear area in which using companies' web services makes perfect sense; you're at their establishment already and want to find something to eat. You don't, like, plug in your hopes and dreams into the menu website, you're just looking for the filet mignon. Now, I hate online menus, but not for any techy reason: I just find it a lot harder to browse a menu on a phone screen than on a piece of paper in front of me. In a lot of ways I actuallly want less tech in my life!
Abstinence-only in regard to third-party web services just isn't possible, as you say. You need to access services to communicate with people, just as you probably need a LinkedIn to advance your career (as much as I hate it...). What I don't like is the attitude that you should just mindlessly use every random cloud service that advertises itself to you without thinking about their incentives, privacy policy, reputation, and quality. People should make wise choices with their computing just as they do with their automobiles or houses. If anything, my total computing footprint is more important to me than either my car or my house, and certainly more irreplaceable. I don't think you can get an insurance policy to restore your precious thoughts and memories. That can definitely be an argument to use cloud storage, but I also think it's a good argument to use multiple offerings and not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Computers have done a lot to empower governments and corporations in modern times. My goal is just that they should also empower families and individuals too, while they're at it. Of course, the dark fear is that things turn out much more somber, and the Digital Society and its Future looks very much like a tiny elite running machines that rule the world. Not that we live in such a world, of course.
This seems like sufficient cause to refuse the QR code and ask for a paper version?
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How is it difficult? I regularly takeout photos at original resolution and then compress the cloud copies.
I guess you won't respond since you blocked me, but perhaps someone else has context.
It's not unusually bad, either by Google standards or by the Cloud in general*, but Takeout has almost no tech support, can take arbitrary amounts of time to create the archive files, throttle(d) after daily download bandwidth limits that are often far less than the typical Takeout, can miss data, and is weirdly inconsistent between Takeouts. It's very far from the typical Photos experience, both in terms of user experience and in terms of literally not being part of the Photos UI.
Fwiw, I've never had any of the issues you mention (except that it's not part of the photos UI). Of course at the tail distribution of outcomes someone is liable to have a bad experience.
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If any of these datasets contain photos, Amazon's photo storage associated with a Prime subscription is truly and completely 'all you can eat'. (well all I can eat anyways, but I'll bet I have more photos than you)
If they ever decide to wrap this service up (Hi Google!), that backup would be fucked and it would be a hassle of course -- but no worse than if I'd never put the photos there.
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