True title: Windows 11 user has 30 years of 'irreplaceable photos and work' locked away in OneDrive - and Microsoft's silence is deafening

Correct link: https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/windows-11-user-...

Original post on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44297652

Stating the obvious but OneDrive is someone else's backups. If you do not own the infrastructure your backup resides on it is not your backup. Never trust or solely rely upon someone else's backups. Always create your own local backups, multiple copies and snapshots, multiple devices. Keep some devices off site, maybe one in your vehicle using your own encryption keys. Use something like RSnapshot on a NAS to keep multiple versions of files without taking up a lot of extra space. Copy the NAS preserving hardlinks and all extended attributes to multiple external SSD's especially for critical data on a regular basis. If this is too much work then the data is just not that important.

OneDrive is not a backup. It's a way to conveniently share data between your devices and for governments to profile you. Encryption in the cloud is not real regardless of how many dishonest mathematical keywords are used. Cloud companies are not going to store yottabytes or quettabytes of data for some philanthropic purpose. Cloud backups may be useful for having a tertiary backup of non sensitive data and having it pre-staged so it can be quickly transferred elsewhere if one does not have a fast internet connection.