In a recent discussion over the tragic loss of saved games that my friend thought were safely in the Steam Cloud, the topic of whether or not you should “trust” cloud storage.  My answer is yes…and no.  If your concern is that someone else might be able to view your files…well, then you’re probably right not to use cloud storage.  If your concern is reliability, though – read on.

I’m a huge fan of services like DropBox and OneDrive, but I don’t rely on them. They exist primarily to keep various important files in sync across several different devices.  My personal setup is:

  • Google Drive – unimportant Office documents and things I want to share with other people, like trip-planning spreadsheets
  • OneDrive – thanks to being an early adopter and winning a contest on The Verge, I have about 225 GB of free OneDrive storage, so OneDrive is my dedicated photo sync and storage service.
  • DropBox – automatic camera uploads and everything else I care about

While these are all incredibly convenient, and I’d recommend any of them myself, you shouldn’t trust any of these services to keep your data long-term.  To me, that’s what these services are about – convenience.  It’s convenient that Steam will sync saves for certain games over the cloud, but I wouldn’t want to rely only on that.

The only devices you should trust are the ones you have physical access to, and what these services do is easily spread your files out across as many physical devices as possible; for me, that means laptop, desktop, and work computer.  That way, if any of those devices fails, I can feel confident that the files I care about exist on another machine that I have physical access to. When I log into a new machine and download DropBox or OneDrive, I know that I will soon have all of my important photos and documents on that device, which means I’ll both have access to them when needed and (more importantly) I have a new physical copy of those important files.

Now, when it comes to long-term backup, your best bet is almost certainly an off-site physical device that you have direct access to.  If you’re like me, though, and too lazy to set up that ideal solution, the next-best-thing is a cloud service like CrashPlan.  Yes, I just finished telling you not to trust the cloud for long-term storage of files you care about, and I still stand by that – if you really care about files, you should have a physical off-site backup.

If you’re like me, though, you just care about minimizing risk as much as possible with as little effort as possible, and for that, I recommend the one-two punch of a cloud syncing service like DropBox and a full-computer backup service like CrashPlan.  Even if you only have one computer, that’s three places your files are kept – locally, on the cloud syncing service, and in the cloud backup service.  I consider that sort of cloud backup “layering” be good enough for most of my needs, and if I do manage to lose an important file, it’s probably my own fault.