Got my laptop stolen in a Medellin cafe and had to finish a client report from a $5 per hour internet place using a borrowed Chromebook.

Debate: is it smarter to always carry a backup drive with you or just rely on cloud storage that needs a good connection, and has anyone else had to work from a sketchy internet cafe to meet a deadline?

3 comments

3 Comments

harperc792mo ago

Honestly, that backup drive is just another thing to get lost or stolen. I had a tiny portable SSD fail on me right when I needed it, total brick. Cloud storage might need a connection, but you can usually find some kind of signal, even if it's slow. I mean, working from a bad internet cafe is rough, but at least your files exist somewhere you can't physically lose.

terrymurray2mo ago

What if the cloud service itself goes down?

amy_reed791mo ago

That's a fair point but honestly, I feel like people overthink the outage angle because big cloud providers have insane redundancy built in. Like @harperc79 said about losing a drive, I mean, I've had local storage fail way more often than I've seen Google or Microsoft go down for more than a few hours. And when they do go down, it's usually some region or specific service not the whole thing. Idk, maybe it's just me but I'd rather trust their teams of engineers watching everything 24/7 than my own backup habit which is basically hoping for the best. Plus most cloud services let you sync to multiple providers now anyway so you're not totally stuck if one hiccups.