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> And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. I was about to say 'you should have other backups', but the FBI is a very powerful persistent threat, and might be the more important problem.
Giving services away for free or selling under value is clearly anti-competitive behavior.
This is one of the reasons i dont like cloud. I only use it for (encrypted) backups and temporary sharing. Not for important stuff. Also i dont want my account or data to be randomly deleted due to vague terms and conditions or policies.
What is essential is to have important data stored in more than one place, something this journalist failed to do. Just storing it at home would also be a mistake--in case your house burns down.
Given that, the reason he doesn't have local copies are the FBI going after him and seizing all of his stuff. Even if you have them in a safe deposit in a bank, they will get it.
* I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error,
* I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and suddenly stop getting their ads shown,
* I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen,
* I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview.
One of my more recent startups was actually funded by a Google based venture firm, and they wanted to know why we refused to use GCP. My answer is that I wanted the startup to actually succeed, and it wasn't worth the risk of dealing with Google's horrible support.
2) Off-Site Backups
Regardless of the threat, whether it is just bad media, house fire, ordinary thieves, or the FBI, relying on some cloud service as your only backup is a plan to fail.
If it is a threat if someone reads the backups, encrypt.
Sure, as a supplemental convenience, use Google or something. But as the only backup of your life's work? I feel really bad for them, they're obviously gutted. But at the same time, Google has been so publicly unreliable and high-handed for so many years (decades, really), that it's hard not to also feel some, 'whelp, what did you expect, doing something like leaving your valuables out on the sidewalk?'.
Edit: And test your backups
Remember, the cloud is just somebody else's computer. This is what happens when you store 250 TB video on somebody else's computer and expect it to be free forever.
Where does it say he expected it to be free? In the article, there's a tweet that says "So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage"
To me, the bigger problem is that companies are allowed to offer "unlimited" anything in their marketing copy.
EDIT: Actually egress seems to be 0,08. So roughly half of what I wrote.