De-Googling my life: Cloud Storage

Saving your important documents in some sort of cloud storage is a good idea.

If you have heard of the “3-2-1 Backup Strategy,” then I am sure you are well aware of the need of keeping an offsite backup.

Understandably, the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is more focused on businesses. However, following a similar strategy for your important documents/files is a great way to ensure that the files are available to you when needed.

The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is:

• Keep three copies of your data (Primary + 2 backups)
• Store this data on two separate storage media’s (USB Flash Drive, External HDD, NAS, Cloud Storage, etc.)
• Store at least one backup offsite (Cloud Storage, Offsite Cold Storage, etc.)

When you look at this, cloud storage becomes both a separate storage media, as well as covering the “at least one backup offsite” rule.

With that being said, Google Drive is a solid cloud storage/cloud sync solutions available to consumers. Unfortunately, Google wants to know a little too much about you.

If you are someone who is privacy conscious, then you will likely stay away from Google, and similar, cloud service providers.

What do I use?

I ended up switching to Proton Drive.

Proton Drive is still technically in “beta” and does not offer a desktop sync client. However, it is a great cloud storage solution that allows me to upload files and documents. It is end-to-end encrypted, hosted in Switzerland, and you get 500GB of storage as part of the Proton Unlimited plan.

Ultimately, I would love to self-host my own storage. I do have plans to build out my own NAS utilizing TrueNAS and replicating important files to an offsite cloud service (B2 Cloud Storage or a server on Vultr/DigitalOcean).

Doing the above is not cheap, and I plan on accomplishing this in the next few years.

I am also hoping that Proton Drive releases a desktop client for Linux. Currently, they have not released the Windows/macOS clients yet, so a Linux client might be ways out.