this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer told MSNBC on Monday that FEMA had yet to assist after the city was ravaged by a tornado days prior.

The tornado first touched down in St. Louis on Friday. The storm — reportedly 20 miles in length at its strongest — killed at least five people in St. Louis County at the time of writing. Spencer reported during a press conference that 38 people had been injured, and that number was expected to increase as recovery efforts continued.

Friday’s tornado was one of many that affected the region over the weekend, with Kentucky also being hit by storms. At the time of writing, dozens of the dead had already been found.

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[–] keckbug@lemmy.world 7 points 9 hours ago (5 children)

I very much like the sentiment, but I’d mostly advocate for a data backup that doesn’t require any particular effort or memory to preserve in an emergency.

Obviously everyone’s personal situation varies, but as a simple default I usually recommend that friends and family simply use whichever cloud drive service is available from the device manufacturer that stores their photos (ie, google Drive, Microsoft one drive, or Apple iCloud). Photos are almost always the most irreplaceable digital asset, storage is typically just a few bucks a month, and using the “default” provider usually requires zero skill, effort, or recurring action. Other than making sure you can afford the auto-debit each month, your backs are mostly foolproof.

Cons include a dependency on a cloud service, which has a recurring charge and a privacy impact. The charge is typically minor vs the cost of a NAS or similar, and most services have some privacy assurances that may be enough to ease your concern. Nobody will ever care as much about your backups as you, but in aggregate a team of skilled full time FAANG engineers is often a more robust administrator than a solo customer.

If you have the desire and resources, you could and should do both backups, or as many as you reasonably can manage in as many places as possible.

[–] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 minutes ago

Cons include a dependency on a cloud service, which has a recurring charge and a privacy impact. The charge is typically minor vs the cost of a NAS or similar, and most services have some privacy assurances that may be enough to ease your concern.

With how places like the USA are degrading right now, the privacy impact is increasingly huge. Having a photo in your archive that could be flagged by an ML filter automatically as doing something now deemed "illegal" like having the wrong skin color is bad.

As for cost, you'd be surprised in that a few years of cloud or less can easily cost as much as a small NAS that can last a decade.

I'd advocate people learn how to preserve their data themselves, it is a good skill to have, and it helps strengthen data education in a time when Tech Bro companies want people as dumb and reliant on their tech as possible.

Easy enough to follow guides or ask an AI to set up a sync with another similar box at someone else's house in a different city or state to have an offsite copy.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 50 minutes ago

Yeah, the most useful backup is the one you’ll actually use. And people will actually use the first-party services, because they just work. There’s no real effort required on the individual’s side, it just happens automatically.

There’s a large self-hosting community on Lemmy, because it sort of goes hand in hand with the whole “anyone can spin up an instance and host Lemmy themselves” thing. But the reality is that self hosting takes work, and a whole fucking lot of learning if you’re not already familiar with how to do it. And it’s easy to fuck it up in ways that can leave you vulnerable to attacks. Many users wouldn’t even know how to register a domain, let alone how to point their hosted services to it.

If you want to self-host your backups, that’s great. I host mine. But I’m not going to advocate for casual users to start doing it, especially when it’s sensitive data like photos. You store that shit on the cloud because that’s the easiest way to accomplish the 3-2-1 backup method; 3 backups, 2 different types of storage media, 1 off site.

The cloud storage can absolutely be your offsite backup. Especially when dealing with something as wide-reaching as a wildfire. If your house burns down due to a wildfire, do you really think your buddy’s house two streets away will be a safe location for your offsite backup? Fuck no, because your buddy’s house is on fire too.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Set one up at a family or friends place. Encrypted and nightly backups. It's off-site and no need to remember.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 48 minutes ago (1 children)

They mentioned wildfires. If your house burns down in a wildfire, your buddy’s house three streets away is also going to be on fire.

[–] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 28 minutes ago

Not if they are in another city or state, though. Easy to cover that contingency.

[–] DarkSpectrum@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

One approach is to use the NAS for all your daily self hosting needs and only use cloud services to store backup images of the NAS.

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 hours ago

Very fair points, I just dislike the cloud so a local solution came to mind first