Your Data: Where should you keep it?

You should keep ALL your data in the cloud! I repeat, put your data in cloud storage – very important.

Why?

One very good reason is that’s it’s safe there. If you lose laptops and external hard drives, or they get stolen or break down, they can be replaced (bloody annoying but not catastrophic); if you lose all the docs, photos, files ie all your data then that can be catastrophic. Put your data in cloud storage.

Here is a good example of this:

None of the principal cloud storage companies (eg Google, Dropbox, Amazon, iCloud) have ever (to my knowledge) had a major hack. Icloud was reported to have been hacked but that was actually a password hack which is a very different animal. A point here to remember is that Password Managers and 2-Factor Authentication (use password october) are essential!

And the major cloud storage companies encrypt your data so even if the data centres are hacked, then your data has to be un-encrypted before it’s of any use to anyone. Their encryption is the best that is available too.

Most of them keep your data in multiple data centres, so in the event of a breakdown or failure of one data centre, your data is safe in another one.

Basically they have the best engineers and technology in the world, so are far safer than your laptop or external hard drive. Their job is to keep your data safe and they are world-best at doing that.

Having said all of the above, it still is a good idea to have external hard drive local backups.

So, what about emails? I recommend using a cloud-based email provider like Gmail, Mac Mail, or Outlook 360 (not the old Outlook). All of these give you storage space as well (a nice bonus).

There are two other main advantages of cloud storage:

1. you can access your data on all your devices – your laptop, smartphone and tablet.
2. collaboration is easier and less time-consuming

Finally – photos on your smartphone – most people have thousands of photos! Both Android and iPhones have the ability to do auto backups to their respective clouds of all your photos.

This has two major advantages:

1. Frees up space on your phone
2. Keeps your photos safe if you lose your phone, or it fails, or gets stolen.

Set up and use iCloud Photos

Setup and use Google Photos 

Google Photos is currently the better option for a whole lot of reasons (for both iPhone and Android)