No. Cloud services, as you correctly stated in the more rational part of the comment, is way way more than just "someone else's computer". Cloud storage backup is a carefully designed system (which includes your local storage, by the way) plus operations+maintenance done by professionals, with the goal of minimizing the probability of a data loss, including human errors, to an absolute minimum. And that minimum is vastly lower. Incomparably lower, than safety/security of one's house.
AWS as a "cloud provider" is very good. A "cloud service" running on AWS is only as good as the people running it, and I have seen some seriously poor process management, and poor data practices. The smaller companies running a "cloud service" on top of someone else's "cloud provider" (such as AWS, Azure, etc.), may not have to worry about hardware or bandwidth, but that doesn't mean their software is reliable.
So just saying "the cloud" says absolutely nothing about the quality of the software. In fact, it doesn't even distinguish between a provider such as AWS, and an application provided by a vendor.
Do you know how many people accidentally destroyed their home-stored negatives
just today in the USA? Sorry, those numbers are not in the news.
No-- How many? Please give specific numbers.
I happen to know way more about cloud services than photography, because it's a much bigger hobby of mine and also a career. I struggle to take any computer-related opinions posted here seriously.
I've been an IT Admin for the past 30 years, first doing Windows desktop deployment, then Novell servers, then Windows servers, and now Unix/Linux servers, currently managing about 2-300 web / file / database servers and research workstations. My primary focus is automation, configuration management, and network security. My opinions are sometimes controversial, but they are based on a very long, successful career.
What does iOS have to do with anything? And why AWS network outage has anything to do with data loss? Not even bothering with irrelevant Code42 randomness as it's not even computer related.
An iOS bug led to data that people thought was being backed up to
the cloud being instead deleted without being recoverable. Another, earlier bug, led to iCloud documents being deleted-- again, without being recoverable. AWS is a major provider of
cloud services, and when they went down in December, there were major application outages across the internet. Sorry-- My stuff is mission critical, and we can't afford "the cloud" being unavailable-- if our EMR system goes down, people could quite literally die. Code42 provides "CrashPlan", a
cloud backup service-- why you think it has nothing to do with computers, I truly do not know. People who were relying on crashplan for backing up their home data
to the cloud were left hanging, and needing a new service, because of a management decision.
But... the fact that computers can fail is absolutely and utterly irrelevant. Because we know how to design around those.
We are
better at handling data loss than we used to be. Still not perfect. Cloud services are easier to maintain for the average company, because the cloud providers do all the heavy lifting-- but that's still not a magic solution. There can still be problems, there can still be human error. I hear people regularly talking about how "the cloud" solves all the problems-- it doesn't. It just moves the problems to someone else's desk.
Just get your digitized data to a PC+NAS+S3 (consumerised one-click option) and your images will be a thousand times safer vs stored in your house. That's 7 copies across 4 locations. To lose your images, your house with both the computer and the NAS need to burn down on the same day as AWS goes out of business and losing 3 data centers to floods and fires, again ALL ON THE SAME DAY.
Or one admin failing to re-enable a job, or a process running incorrectly, or your one-click software gets confused, and instructs the cloud to erase all 6 of your cloud-based copies. Not impossible, and has happened before, and will happen again.
Further, how do you rescan those negatives stored on the cloud? Me having physical negatives is Yet Another Backup. One more layer in protecting random cat photos from not being preserved for future generations of indifference.
But-- for your hypothetical situation.... Do you know what the "Carrington Event" was? Is your datacenter, let alone your home network ready for another one? Mine isn't-- well, it might be, it's in the basement of an old, heavy building. We might be OK-- but personally, I'm hoping I'm retired before it happens.
Another way to think about it is this: an AWS failure will result in a trillion+ dollars worth of losses across numerous organizations. It is safe to assume that they have spent appropriate resources and hired brainy people to prevent that from happening. It would be foolish to assume that a physical copy stored in a house is more secure than that.
Again-- you're assuming that the applications on the virtual servers being run on AWS (which has already shown it can be fallible) are run with the same level of care and caution as the AWS host servers. You're also assuming that financial risk leads to responsible behavior-- we learned that wasn't true in 2001 and 2008.
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