Ammon News - For the longest time, the easiest way to deal with limited storage on your devices was to get an external hard drive. This did the job just fine, but ultimately had its own share of problems. Cloud storage offers a much-needed alternative to keeping a large physical drive, and one that has many benefits — including a sleek new icon design if you're using Google Drive. You don't need to connect your cloud storage with a cable to access your data, there's no risk of losing or physically damaging the drive, and you can use your phone to view files even when you're on the move.

Like with any other innovation, this isn't without its downsides. You're essentially borrowing another company's storage and trusting them with your files. Fortunately, these companies are mostly reliable, and you won't have to worry about some random hacker stealing your data from them.

Still, if you're not careful, it's possible you might be making dangerous cloud storage mistakes. While some of these might only mildly inconvenience you, certain mistakes can be quite a bit riskier.

1. Not using an email you frequently check

Many of us have multiple email addresses, and if you have more than a few, you probably don't check them all every day. This is largely harmless, but if you're using one of these inactive email addresses for your cloud account, you can potentially run into problems.

Whenever cloud storage providers change certain things about their services or just need to contact you, they usually send an email. These are normally just policy changes or new features in the app, but if you're the type to set up auto-backup and then rarely ever open the app manually to check what's new, there's much more important information you can miss out on.

For example, if your limited storage plan is almost filled up, you'll likely receive an email telling you that. If you never read this, you might end up completely filling your storage, at which point new files cannot be backed up. This can lead to data loss, depending on how long you ignore it. Similarly, although much less common, if your service provider changes the terms or pricing of their plans, it's important that you keep track of this if you don't want unwanted charges. You also receive email alerts whenever there's a new login, so ensuring that you get these notifications is important if you want to keep your data secure.

2. Backing up sensitive data

Cloud storage may solve most of the issues associated with physical hard drives, but that doesn't mean you should be uploading all your information to a cloud server. There are files that you should never back up on cloud storage, because if they were to fall into the hands of someone malicious, it could lead to dire consequences. 

This includes confidential information like tax records that show your financial situation, your medical history, and pretty much anything related to you legally. If any malicious person got access to this information, they could commit identity theft by pretending to be you. This is why uploading sensitive documents onto a cloud server is one of the most dangerous cloud storage mistakes you can make.

The companies behind the biggest cloud storage apps — be it Google, Apple, or Microsoft — can access your online vault under specific circumstances, and there's always the chance of a data breach, but they employ strict security measures that make it very hard to do so. The bigger risk here is if someone steals your password, has access to a device you're logged into, or you fall for a phishing scam. Either way, it's better to be safe than sorry, so storing sensitive data on a local drive is much safer. If you still want to store these files online, we recommend that you at least encrypt your files before uploading them to the cloud.

3. Automatic backups for everything

It might seem easy enough to set up your cloud storage once, enable all your data to back up automatically, and then never worry about forgetting to make regular backups of your files. This, however, can be costly, especially if you have sensitive or confidential information on your computer.

We've already talked about how there are certain files that it's best not to upload online. With auto-backup on, even if you're trying to avoid doing this, the system can automatically back up your sensitive files into your cloud account.

Furthermore, if you're on a limited plan, complete backups of all files on your computer can quickly fill up your storage. A single high-quality video file can take upwards of a gigabyte by itself, and if you start backing up all your camera recordings, screen captures, and large downloaded files to your cloud storage, even an expensive plan will fill up fast. To ensure this doesn't happen, always select what specific folders you want to back up.


4. Relying purely on cloud storage

Cloud storage seems like the next step in technology in terms of storage management. It improves on everything that your old physical storage gives you, so why even bother relying on an HDD? Cloud storage isn't susceptible to the same risks as a physical HDD or SSD — you can't accidentally damage it, lose it, or corrupt the files on it due to a power surge, for example — but that doesn't mean it's immune to harm. 

In the case that the account you're using for your cloud storage gets compromised or you lose access to it, there's not much you can do to recover all the files you've backed up. Similarly, if a cloud service provider chooses to hike their subscription prices or lower the limits on their plans, you might find yourself having to migrate all your data to another server.

Even if none of these risks were there, you still shouldn't keep only one copy of your data. Having a physical backup of your cloud drive helps preserve the data, and you don't have to worry about not having access to it when you need it. Physical storage aside, you shouldn't only have one copy of your data on the cloud either; if you have the means, creating multiple copies of your backup on different cloud services ensures that you never have to suffer from data loss ever again.


5. Using auto-sync for everything

For most people, cloud storage is a way to create backups of your files so they don't clog up your local computer or phone's storage. However, for others, the bigger benefit is data integrity, where you don't have to worry about finding a certain file when you need it because all your devices have these files.

Auto-sync essentially mirrors the data in your physical drive to your cloud storage and vice versa. Whenever you download a new file, it's backed up to the cloud. Similarly, if you have another computer connected to the cloud, the same file can be accessed from it as well. This makes file management much easier, since you can skip the step of manually backing up and downloading files when you move from one device to another.

While certainly a neat feature, auto-sync can have many risk factors as well. First, if you're not restricting what gets synced, the files from your work computer might get mixed with a personal device. This can also quickly fill up your cloud storage, since everything you download on each of your devices will be backed up to the cloud. Unlike with a typical cloud backup, syncing also goes both ways, meaning that you delete a file from one device to clear up some storage, the same file also gets deleted from the cloud, as well as all other devices. As such, if you plan on having auto-sync turned on, it's important to go through exactly what folders and what kinds of files get synced across your devices and to be careful with what you're deleting.

BGR