Clarification on Cloud Sync Services

kevvyb · 04 Oct 2021

Hi

I was thinking abotu adding a cloud sync service to my data security measures which already include numerous copies of data including off-site using PC, laptop and various external hard drives.

Just want to make sure that I am not missing something and understanding correctly how these services work wether the offerings from the likes of Google, Microsoft et al or an open source end to end encrypted option such as sync.com

Would I be right in saying that if I want to effectively sync/mirror my whole documents library file to one of these services, I effectively have to move all the files from the local library 'Documents' into the relevant sync folder and work on the files in the sync folder location (i.e. store nothing locally in the MS library folders)? I ask this because it seems that by moving the files to the sync folder I am just creating another copy which takes up more disk space.

Thank you in advance.

Samuria · 04 Oct 2021

No you can set which folders you sync and remove any you don't want to sync Google gives you the option to sync to photos or drive with photos you can search by date type etc

kevvyb · 31 Oct 2021

Samuria said:

No you can set which folders you sync and remove any you don't want to sync Google gives you the option to sync to photos or drive with photos you can search by date type etc

Thanks for the reply but it doesn't really answer the sunstance of my question.

TairikuOkami · 31 Oct 2021

kevvyb said:

Would I be right in saying that if I want to effectively sync/mirror my whole documents library file to one of these services, I effectively have to move all the files from the local library 'Documents' into the relevant sync folder and work on the files in the sync folder location (i.e. store nothing locally in the MS library folders)?

Quite the opposite, if you sync documents folder, you will have only one.
That is actually pretty dangerous, because you will have no backup at all.
Onedrive allows to store files online only, so nothing will take space locally.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...1-7092438fb38e

Onedrive and Google use file versioning, so you will have multiple backups of any file, but if you remove the file, even by an accident, or it will get corrupted or you will loose access to your account, you will loose it all. I have recently lost ton of work because of this. Sync is useful, but never relies just upon it. Backup manually!