this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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I would never tell anyone to store their most important files only in one place! On top of that, the one place being not your own computer?!
I think these cloud companies have been pretty successful convincing people that at-home storage is more at-risk than the cloud because you could always have a house fire or something, or your hard drive could fail, or whatever. But it seems the pendulum is now swinging the other way as people get wise to the inherent dangers of only keeping things on the cloud, and trusting a company with your data no less.
Computer + cloud backup seems a pretty sensible solution to me. But I'm talking about people who are really not into computers.
One thing a lot of people here seem to miss: The onedrive app actually calls it "Backup". So users assume they have a copy of it on their computer and it is "backed up" to OneDrive.
But the other thing OneDrive does is turn on "Selective Sync", where it will actually delete the files off your local device "to free up storage". It looks like it is on your local computer, but when an app goes to use it, OneDrive quickly downloads it so the app is none the wiser that it wasn't actually there a moment ago. This is all seamless to the user, until one day they are offline and can't get to most of their files, or they lose access to their Microsoft account.
Everything a user needs to know is in the interface, Microsoft gives little symbols on the file to specify if there is a local copy or not, but most users have no idea what any of that means.
To top it off, just a little icing on the cake, if a user signs into the computer with a Microsoft account, bitlocker (full disk encryption) is automatically turned on, and the recovery key is shoved in their Microsoft account. This is convenient, but if they lose access to their Microsoft account, they can't log into the computer to get it, and they can't log into the website to get the bitlocker key. So even if their files are still on the PC, they have zero way to recover them.
Honestly, they've created a very convenient system, until it is impossible to recover anything. Business Environments have administrators that can help users by resetting their passwords or pulling a bitlocker key out of Intune, but for a home user? You're just SOL.
Oh totally. But this thread and the comment you replied to are talking about using ONLY someone else’s computer as a storage location, not redundancy.
I do agree, using only cloud backup storage is a bad idea.
Sorry; did not mean to molest anyone.