Amazon Drive

Posted by: EJS on 14 August 2016

It had to happen some time - one of my (relatively new) single 4Tb drives has started failing. I have backups but the experience was slightly unsettling and more time consuming than I'd like, and it's prompted me to look at online alternatives.

Amazon Drive in particular looks like a good deal: USD 60/year for unlimited storage for whatever you want to store. It's fast, too - almost as fast as my home upload speed theoretically permits (100 Mbit/s). However, the terms of use include a very interesting paragraph:

3.3 "Our Use of Your Files to Provide the Service. We may use, access, and retain Your Files in order to provide the Service to you and enforce the terms of the Agreement, and you give us all permissions we need to do so. These permissions include, for example, the rights to copy Your Files for backup purposes, modify Your Files to enable access in different formats, use information about Your Files to organize them on your behalf, and access Your Files to provide technical support. Amazon respects your privacy and Your Files are subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice located at www.amazon.com/privacy."

I'm not a lawyer or an IT pro, but this paragraph comes close to my idea of giving Amazon read-write access to all the files I store on Amazon. Now, I appreciate that they've built in back doors, want to co-operate with authorities etc, but in my mind it goes a bit far to simply hand them the keys to the locker?

Cheers

Posted on: 14 August 2016 by Harry

My approach is pragmatic. I won't hand my shit over to a third party no matter what their privacy policy is and I won't let a remote server scan my local disks. If access to my local data is mandated I will comply with a court order. Amazon have demonstrated (in other matters) that they are a company not to be trusted and while this kind of arrogance might be nothing out of the corporate ordinary, it should not be encouraged. Local storage and backup is so simple. And you can organise, store and scale it in a manner that suits you.

Posted on: 15 August 2016 by EJS

Fair challenge, Harry - I've never had a need for a NAS at home but started looking at one today. I like the idea of a RAID unit for basic protection against disc errors, and which backs itself up to another unit on an offsite location, or a simple USB drive, without me interfering. Most decent units seem to be able to do this.

Posted on: 15 August 2016 by EJS

Quick update: I've set up a Synology 2-bay drive in Raid-1 config, which is busy building sparseimages with music and photo. These conveniently mount as surprisingly responsive drives on the mac.