Am I too old? I only trust hard saving to offline storage. Be that an external hdd or a flash drive.

The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:

Don’t trust cloud companies.

Cloud can be a backup, it absolutely should never be your only copy.

But keep in mind they will probably use that data for anything they want, like training AI models. So make sure you are ok with them doing that on any data you put there. This is mostly why I fill my cloud space with incoherent nonsense.

Always, always backup. And frequently! Don't trust your local harddrive (especially if it's a device you frequently take with you), don't trust flashdrives, don't even trust your local fileserver if it doesn't have built-in backups (and even if it does, check that those backups actually work). If it's not saved on at least two physical places (two drives in the same PC/server count, but it's sketchy on its own), it's not backed up!

Ah yes, the very first lesson I'd teach in my multimedia 'authoring' class: Back your shit up, here's 11 ways to do that; if you EVER tell me you lost your work as an excuse I'm going to LAUGH IN YOUR FACE as I assign you a ZERO.

TLDR: make multiple backups

This is extra bad because they want you to use cloud files in gdrive (I can't remember what the feature is actually called), which doesn't save the content locally on your computer, but puts an icon that will download the content from Google servers when you click on it. This means you have no local backup of your data in your computer backups.

In the process of degoogling my life. Email and files are gone, but I use GMaps, still.

Google (still) offers a regular backup of your data to download. You can set it up to run at intervals and just download the entire thing. Includes file (and photos), email, messages, etc. It's great for products you forget you were using, and great for an offline backup.

I have TWO USB backups.

My brother fucked one up for his Windows XP obsession. Which would be funny, if it were not dangerous.

The fuck was this dude watching/writing down for google to think it was related to terrorism or trafficking????

The only time in my life I've seriously considered suicide was when I lost the usb drive that had all my novel notes on it. If a major company ripped everything from me because "reasons", I'd be considering homicide instead.

By the way, git is good for more than just software. I keep my novel notes in a git repository these days.

What a clusterfuck.

Be careful who you trust with your data! And back it up

Is local storage even safe from big corp just remotely nuking your files? I'm sure there's a secret button somewhere to mass delete photos from people's phones incase they start rolling in the tanks to crush a protest.

reads like an ad for that service they plugged

So he just moves the files from one online storage to another? How stupid can one be?

I just realized the other day that one of the updates on my Chromebook automatically installed something called "NotebookLM" on my app bar. Never asked for it. Never even looked at apps on my Chromebook before. But it's there now, and it super secret bloodswap pinky swares it won't steal my ideas or writing. What an odd thing to say on first open.

Cloud drives are a handy form of secondary backup, IF you secure the contents with a tool like Cryptomator. I backup my content to a local NAS which one-way syncs nightly to an external drive attached to Raspberry Pi at my office and a cryptomator Dropbox, that in turn one way syncs to cryptomator Google Drive. I also manually encrypt and upload important documents to Proton Drive and Mega as cold storage.