Dear Cathy,
You asked me to write this, I suppose in the hopes that reading it would encourage other people to heed the dire warning embedded in your piece about the cloud which isn’t a cloud.
So here goes:
After helping you get rid of your OneDrive, I decided to wipe out my CrashPlan system which had been set up by my job. I found that it had 722 GB of stuff, since it was constantly refreshing, updating, storing new things over many years. In order to safely keep my stuff, I had to spend a fair amount of boring time copying everything from my laptop onto a main drive (will say more below about that) and then copy all of that onto a clone. Between my laptop, pictures and music, that was 426 GB.
And then with the help of the tech guy at school, I wiped CrashPlan and deleted it from my laptop.
One down, two to go: OneDrive and my Google Drive.
OneDrive is going to stay as it is because it only had all my films–as MOVs and DCPS–and those take forever to upload so I do really have to have those easily accessible if anyone needs a copy. Boo hoo but what can ya do?
And Google Drive, a thing I love for saving and sharing lots of stuff. LOTS! It was storing 427.89 GB of stuff. So, more very boring time figuring out what was needed and what wasn’t. End result: I trashed 225.4 GB. I still have 202.45 GB in it but all considered more essential stuff related to film work. I don’t like having that much still on the cloud but…
As for storing on hard drives: Yes, they eventually die so yes, it means having to refresh them every some years. But one thing is to only buy solid state drives, SSD drives, which are much more reliable than older spinning drives (they eventually spin themselves to exhaustion and die.) More costly than the spinners, but worth the investment.
A good brand is Sandisk. And yes, it makes a lot of sense to CLONE that hard drive and then store it somewhere that is NOT in the same location as the main drive.
Long story short, it took a long boring time over a few days but I’m glad to have wiped 947 GB off the it’s-not-a-cloud cloud.
Love,
Su