[dayglored]

> I keep my data on my machines and my backups. Don’t trust clouds.

The rules I try to follow for important stuff:

1. Never have only one copy of anything important. Have two or more copies, in different places.
2. Backup important ground-based data to an encrypted secure cloud service if you don't have a separate physical facility somewhere safe.
3. Backup important cloud-based data to secure off-site storage on the ground that you can protect.
4. Become religious about synchronizing ground and cloud copies. During sync, keep a third copy in case the sync communications fails horribly.
5. Periodically verify that you have readable copies on the ground of everything important. If you're using a separate off-site ground facility instead of cloud, same goes true for that.

Of course, you don't have to follow those rules. But I do my best to do so, and it's paid off from time to time in the past.

I don't trust clouds either. But my house burned down to an ash pile in 1995, taking everything with it that I didn't have in my pockets, in my car, or in my off-site storage at the time. I don't trust ground storage either.

[dagunk]

Of course, you don’t have to follow those rules. But I do my best to do so, and it’s paid off from time to time in the past.

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That’s a good set of rules, especially the off-site storage. I don’t use clouds, but....

Primary machine has two drives in it, second drive is for backups in case the primary drive craps.

I also have two external drives, primary and secondary, with full home directory and some setup information backups on them (printcap, wpa_applicant.config, FVWM3 config,....).

All work just like they’re supposed to. I reload the operating systems and utilities every two or three years and have reloaded the backups from all sources. They work. Saved my butt a few times....

All my boxes are unix-based (Linux or Freebsd).