Google Drive and Backup

It’s not that he doesn’t like Photos, he just doesn’t see why he needs a copy of every photo he’s ever taken copied to every device.

I agree, the places for photos is on the google server not the device. You just temporarily pull down what you need to see there and then.

On a related note – if you are on the Insider builds of Windows 10 they have finally restored the “Smart Files” or “Placeholder” feature – now called “Files on demand”. The old (8.1) version was superb – and might have got a bit of traction for cheap windows tablets if they didn’t kill it with W10 – but that is MS for you. Anyway the new version is at a glance even better – you can chose what syncs and what doesn’t – but more importantly you have the option to see everything on your OneDrive whether it is synced or not. There are also more options than before, but just bringing this back has made me very happy, and makes Offoce 365 (with 1TB OneDrive) a great deal again – especially if you shop around.

TBH I can do all this sort of thing with my Synology NAS with a lot more control.

Cloud Station Backup lets me backup individual folders from a PC to the NAS. Cloud Station Drive lets me sync folders across multiple PCs or even multiple NAS. You can have multiple folders as the target and decide which PCs will sync with what and each user has a private “home” folder. They both have versioning i.e. up to 32 levels of history.

Mobile wise, DS Photo allows you to do what you can do with Google Photos including auto backup when in WiFi and sharing with others. DS File lets you do the same with files.

I can then back all this up to an external USB drive (or a Cloud drive like Google drive) with up to 65535 versions saved with cross-version deduplication. You can plug the USB drive directly into a PC if necessary to restore the data.

But what the heck, for home users it’s all free and great if you have the bandwidth. For businesses that demand more security and control the Synology can do more for a couple of hundred quid.

Binary, 65536 is 2^16. 16 bits = 2 bytes. So the range is 0 to 65535. For a daily backup that’s 179 years ?

The compression and deduplication algorithms are very efficient but 31 days is good enough for me. You can also manually lock a backup, which I have done in anger when about to do a major infrastructure change.

If you want the ultimate “who cares about wannacrypt” solution, this is it. The problem with most sync services is the lack of versioning. It also comes in handy for every day user cock-ups.

From the backup and sync perspective Google is catching up with Synology, from the photo app perspective the reverse is true. But I am coming across more and more businesses that do not trust “the Cloud” and are willing to spend a modest amount to be in control. It’s not the “spying” that really bothers them (although it does), it’s the user login data breaches. With the data protection laws about to ramp up whether we leave the EU or not, they are right to.