Like any other innovation, this is not without its drawbacks. You’re essentially borrowing another company’s storage and trusting them with your files. Fortunately, these companies are mostly reliable and you won’t have to worry about a random hacker stealing your data from them.
However, if you’re not careful, you may make dangerous cloud storage mistakes. While some of these may only bother you slightly, some mistakes can be a little riskier.
1. Don’t use an email you check frequently
Whenever cloud storage providers change some elements of their services or simply need to contact you, they usually send an email. These are usually just policy changes or new features in the app, but if you’re the type who sets up autosave and rarely opens the app manually to check what’s new, you may be missing much more important information.
For example, if your limited storage plan is almost full, you’ll likely receive an email letting you know. If you never read this, you risk filling up your storage completely, in which case new files will no longer be able to be saved. This may cause data loss, depending on how long you ignore it. Likewise, although much less common, if your service provider changes the terms or prices of their plans, it’s important that you keep track of this if you don’t want unwanted charges. You also receive email alerts whenever there is a new connection, so it’s important to make sure you receive these notifications if you want to protect your data.
2. Backup of sensitive data
This includes confidential information such as tax records that show your financial situation, medical history, and just about anything else that legally concerns you. If an attacker had access to this information, they could commit identity theft by pretending to be you. This is why uploading sensitive documents to a cloud server is one of the most dangerous cloud storage mistakes you can make.
The companies behind the biggest cloud storage apps – whether it’s Google, Apple or Microsoft – can access your online vault in specific circumstances, and there’s always a risk of a data breach, but they employ strict security measures that make this very difficult. The biggest risk here is if someone steals your password, gains access to a device you’re logged into, or if you fall for a phishing scam. Either way, prevention is better than cure, so storing sensitive data on a local drive is much safer. If you still want to store these files online, we recommend that you at least encrypt your files before uploading them to the cloud.
3. Automatic backups for everything
We have already explained that there are certain files that are best not to download online. With automatic backup enabled, even if you try to avoid doing so, the system can automatically backup your sensitive files to your cloud account.
Plus, if you’re on a limited plan, full backups of all the files on your computer can quickly fill up your storage space. A single high-quality video file can take up more than a gigabyte alone, and if you start saving all your camera recordings, screenshots, and large uploaded files to your cloud storage, even an expensive plan will fill up quickly. To prevent this from happening, always select the specific folders you want to back up.
4. Rely only on cloud storage
In case the account you use for your cloud storage is compromised or you lose access to it, there is little you can do to recover all the files you have backed up. Likewise, if a cloud service provider chooses to increase its subscription prices or reduce its plan limits, you may need to migrate all of your data to another server.
Even if none of these risks existed, you still shouldn’t keep a single copy of your data. Having a physical backup of your cloud drive helps preserve data and you don’t have to worry about not having access to it when you need it. Aside from physical storage, you shouldn’t have a single copy of your data on the cloud either; If you can afford it, creating multiple copies of your backup across different cloud services ensures that you never have to experience data loss again.
5. Use Auto-Sync for Everything
Auto-sync basically mirrors data from your physical drive to your cloud storage and vice versa. Every time you upload a new file, it is saved to the cloud. Similarly, if you have another computer connected to the cloud, the same file can be accessed from there as well. This makes file management much easier, since you can skip the step of manually saving and downloading files when switching from one device to another.
While it’s certainly a nice feature, auto-sync can also present many risk factors. First, if you don’t limit what gets synced, files on your work computer can get mixed up with a personal device. This can also quickly fill up your cloud storage, since everything you download on each of your devices will be backed up to the cloud. Unlike a regular cloud backup, syncing also happens both ways, meaning you delete a file from one device to free up storage space, and the same file is also deleted from the cloud, along with all other devices. As such, if you’re considering enabling automatic syncing, it’s important to determine exactly which folders and file types are synced across your devices and be careful about what you delete.
