I would have to agree with that. I seem to have acquired many Gb over the years and may well begin to store my photos there.
SSDs are so much more affordable than they used to be. I think today I can buy a 1TB drive for the same price as I paid for the 250Gb I put in the old Macbook. Might be worth looking at getting some SSDs and enclosures… Hmmmm
if you know you have the pics in the cloud, you probably could get away with that, but every once in a while I’d still make a physical backup offline somewhere. I’d probably even go to the trouble of picking some prized photos out & having them professionally printed.
… but …
… drum roll …
I haven’t 
lololmao
I would still advise caution with low sensitivity data - identity theft is a pain. In particular if end-users begin to drop their guard, then they might actually mistake information that is valuable, such as their workplaces’ documents & other information that can be used in supply chain attacks possibly with extortion type exfiltrate/crytolocker kind of attacks - i.e. “just” home user? might be a bit dangerous to advise that, point blank.
Round of applause for backup requirements are in the eye of the beholder.
LOL! I have. 2 clones drives (one the main internal to an external) and the other which has photos to yet a third. CCC to the rescue.
I quite agree. My personal judgment is that if I am happy to see it appear in Wikipedia, with my name attached, then it is indeed low-sensitivity. Not otherwise.
But that is just me. Twenty years of helping home users with IT security has, however taught me one thing, which is that what people would like to appear about themselves is very diverse. As you yourself hinted, some people would be happy to have all their birthday-suit photos plastered all over Wikipedia’s front page! For such people, I suspect the very best cloud storage would be totally leaky, creaky and delightfully unsafe!
To return to the original question:
… as safe or unsafe as you would like them to be!
For the recod, my personal home-computer data-backup system is:
backup of disk images to two different hard-drives (one each alternative 3-months). Except during actual backing up, these drives are left shut down and offline. I figure that, with this infrequent usage, they should remain useable for at least a decade, if not two or three - which means they may well outlive me! My primary aim is to be able to recover key operating systems, software and at least most of my important data in case of either catastrophic disk failure (of which I have had many), or virus or ransomware attacks (of which I have had at least one).
backup of my (very small amount of ) important data to a mix of local and cloud storage. In this, my aim is to keep this data safe for the 3-6 months until it gets permanently archived as part of the regular disk backup.
I realise this is not a perfect system - I can easily imagine determined ransomware people breaking through my defenses. In the end, like all such defensive systems, it is a compromise in which one juggles the absolute certainty of personal inconvenience of maintaining one’s security with the hopefully remote chance of somebody deliberately and maliciously targeting your all-but commercially-valueless data.
I used to think so, but experience has taught me that even securing HDDs (in their antistatic bags or in their plastic shells) in a humidity controlled dark non-magnetic place is not enough to stop some of them dying after a few years. This has happened across a range of quality brand disks (and types).
Well put. I suspect HDD may be more reliable when used a bit so data on any degrading area gets picked up and relocated from time to time. Once the HDD exhausts the spare sectors or a hole gets beyond a certain size the data is lost, save for the options of trying $$$$$ recovery services.
Cloud services still have to store the data using some technology. So Cloud does not completely remove whatever problems may exist with HDD or SSD storage.
However with a desire to store data for three decades, media failure will be the least of your concerns. The Cloud service has to be still in operation after three decades and still offering acceptable Terms and Conditions.
