What happens to your data when the cloud bursts? Wayne Williams looks at how safe your photos, videos and other files are online and explains how to avoid losing them
With Picasa Web Albums set to close in May, Microsoft OneDrive slashing the amount of free storage it offers and other online services either changing hands or – like Yahoo – in financial trouble, you may be wondering if the cloud is really the best place to store your important files. Trusting your photos, videos, documents and emails to a website is a lot riskier than you imagine because if that company disappears, it will take your data with it – unless you act first.
In this cover feature, we’ll look at some of the big names that have closed or changed their terms recently, or are tipped to do so, and recommend suitable alternatives you can switch to. We’ll also take a closer look at what happens to your data when a website shuts down, and explain the best ways to move your files from one online location to another.
WHY YOU SHOULD MOVE YOUR FILES
It’s easy to be complacent about storing your files in the cloud. Here, we explain how convenience can come at a cost
Are my files not safe where they are?
Possibly, but you can’t take their safety for granted. A few years ago, it was mainly smaller, lesser-known cloud-storage services that were likely to close and take your data with them. But recently, several big names have shut down their online services or changed their terms and conditions to reduce the amount of storage they offer. Yes, you could leave your files where they are until you receive official word that the service is shutting down, but the prudent move would to be to prepare for the worst ahead of time.
Which types of online service are in danger of closing?
More than you might think: storage, social media and webmail services are all potentially at risk. We don’t want to exaggerate the situation – there’s every chance the services you use will be around for many years to come – but as we’ve seen recently with Google closing Picasa, Friends Reunited signing off and Copy and CudaDrive set to perish on 1 May, the safety of your data is no longer assured.
Which specific services are at risk?
That’s a difficult question to answer, because there’s usually no advance warning. It’s likely that the first you’ll know about a service shutting down or changing its terms to your detriment is an online rumour that will eventually be followed by an official announcement from the company.
For example, although there’s no indication that popular Yahoo services such as Mail and Flickr are likely to close any time soon (if at all), the Marissa Mayer-led tech firm is currently experiencing a turbulent time. Yahoo recently pulled the plug on many of its digital magazines, including Yahoo Food, Yahoo Health and Yahoo Autos; shut down its in-house research arm, Yahoo Labs; and abandoned businesses such as Games and Smart TV. Yahoo has also closed offices around the world and cut around 1,700 jobs.
Additionally, Tumblr isn’t doing anywhere near as well as Yahoo hoped when it acquired the blogging platform three years ago, and there are even rumours that Yahoo might put itself up for sale (bit.ly/yahoo392). If that happens, you can expect some big changes, some of which will be a worry to Tumblr bloggers. And while Yahoo’s photo-storage service Flickr currently gives its users 1TB of space for free, it’s likely that a major sell-off would result in this generous allowance being curbed.
What other concerns are there to be aware of?
Even if an online service isn’t closed down altogether, there’s a chance that the amount of free space it offers may be reduced as the company tries to make money from non-paying users. Apple has traditionally given customers a comparatively measly 5GB of free iCloud storage and priced additional space at an attractive rate, and other firms are now taking a similar approach.
Most notably, Microsoft recently slashed the amount of free OneDrive cloud storage offered to users from 15GB to 5GB “in pursuit of productivity and collaboration” (bit.ly/onedrive392), and discontinued the 15GB camera-roll storage bonus at the same time. Office 365 Home, Personal and University subscribers used to enjoy unlimited online storage, but Microsoft also put a stop to that and removed some paid-for tiers, too.
Why are web companies changing their terms?
It’s easy to forget that most websites are businesses, which exist to make money and need to ensure they put their resources into the most profitable ideas. Copy (www.copy.com) and CudaDrive (www.cudadrive.com) offered cloud storage and sharing services to millions of users for more than four years, but the firm behind them, Barracuda, now believes there’s more money to be made in cloud-based backup, data protection and “business continuity”, so it has closed both services.
In the case of the much-loved Picasa Web Albums (picasaweb.google.com), Google feels that its Google Photos service (photos.google.com) is a superior alternative and is seeking to avoid offering two similar products. Streamlining and costsaving are invariably the factors that lead to change.
What happens to my files when a service shuts down?
If you use Picasa Web Albums, your images will already have been copied over to Google Photos, ready for you to access via your usual Google login. If you don’t want to use Photos, Google plans to create “a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data” to view, download or delete your images.
Picasa’s Desktop program will continue to work once Web Albums shuts down, but Google will no longer support it by offering updates and bug fixes.
There are no fixed rules about what happens when a company closes the doors on an online service. Some firms provide plenty of advance warning and send several reminders; others shut up shop quickly and only give you a matter of weeks to save your files. A service may also provide instructions on how to move your content elsewhere.
When Symantec’s online-storage service Norton Zone shut down back in 2014, customers were still able to access their files for 60 days. For the first month, the files could be accessed from any device, but then mobile support was switched off, so the files could only be accessed from a Windows PC or Mac. All the service’s features, including sharing, were turned off, too. After that period, all files and related data, including file names, were permanently deleted.
That’s a fairly typical approach. Any files left in the cloud, once the service is fully shut down, will be deleted.
If you’ve paid for a service, any unused fees should be refunded, although this will depend on whether a company has gone bankrupt or not. If it has, you may still be able get some of your money back, but there’s no guarantee of that.
So if I already have a backup of my files, I needn’t worry?
In theory. Once the cloud-storage service shuts down, any remaining content should be securely deleted and (asuming you have offline copies) you’ll be the only person with access to those files. But if the entire company has gone under, it may not be as thorough as it should, and the drives containing your data could get into the wrong hands when hardware is sold off to the highest bidder. Once you know a service holding your data is going to cease trading, you should get in there fast and delete your files yourself.
What happens when the amount of free storage is cut?
If the amount of storage you’re given for free is significantly reduced, you’ll have to either delete some files or switch to a paid-for plan. Microsoft slashed free OneDrive storage from 15GB+ to just 5GB at the end of January (unless you acted to save your storage in advance), but it’s giving users until the end of March to take action. If your account is over its quota after that date, it will be made read-only, which means you’ll be able to view and download files, but not upload new content. If your account is still over its quota after nine months, the storage will be locked until enough files have been deleted or you upgrade to a paid-for account. And if you’re still in the red after a year, Microsoft will consider deleting the excess data to forcibly bring the account under control.
If you want to stick with OneDrive for your cloud-storage needs and 5GB isn’t enough, an Office 365 Personal plan (bit.ly/office392) will be your best bet. As well as getting the latest version of Microsoft Office, you also get 1TB of OneDrive storage for £59.99 a year. If you don’t need Office (or already have a copy), moving elsewhere makes sense.
WHO YOU SHOULD SWITCH TO AND HOW
If you’re concerned that the online service you currently use is at risk of closing, here’s what you need to do to make sure your files are safe
Just as people tend to stick with the same energy supplier even after a major price hike – because it’s easier than switching – so they are likely to stay with the same cloud-storage provider because their files are already uploaded there and they don’t want the hassle of moving them. But the truth is that transferring your files from one service to another doesn’t have to be a chore, and it should be easy to find a like-forlike service.
If you’re currently storing your files in OneDrive, then switching to Google Drive makes a lot of sense because the current starting quota for free storage is 15GB, which is the same as Microsoft used to offer. You can create a new Google account purely for this purpose.
If you store your photos in Flickr, then switching to Google Photos is the obvious choice. Flickr offers 1TB of storage, while the quota for Google Photos is “unlimited”, provided your photos and videos are below a certain size. Amazon Prime subscribers should definitely use Amazon’s Prime Photos (bit.ly/primephotos392), which is included as part of your subscription and also provides unlimited free storage. If you cancel your Prime membership at any time, your photos will be moved to Amazon Cloud Drive and you’ll have to make do with just 5GB of storage, or pay for additional space.
To transfer your files, you can of course manually download them from one service and then upload them to another, but that’s quite a lot of work and there are much easier ways to do this. When you sign up with a service such as OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox on your PC, cloud-storage folders are automatically created for you in Windows Explorer, which means you can simply drag and drop your files from one service to another. Select all your files in OneDrive, for example (by pressing Ctrl+A), then drag them to the Google Drive folder (or copy and paste them) and wait for the transfer to complete.
There are several third-party tools available that can automate the transfer process for you. Mover (mover.io) is an excellent tool that makes it easy to move content from one location to another. It supports all the major services including Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and Google Drive, and is entirely free for home users. Once your files have been transferred over, you can disconnect the linked services.
Otixo (www.otixo.com) is also worth a look and lets you access all your online files with a single login and share content across services. Once you are logged in, you can simply drag and drop your files from one location to another. Otixo supports all the most popular storage services, as well as Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Evernote and More.
BACK UP YOUR CLOUD DATA
We often use online services as a backup for our files, but it’s also worth backing up those backups in case the sites go bust. Here’s how to do it
Quite a few cloud-storage services have closed over the past few years, but there are still plenty to choose from, and there’s nothing to stop you from having multiple accounts across different services. You can have more than one Google Drive account, more than one OneDrive account, and other accounts with Box, Dropbox, Flickr, iCloud and so on. That might seem like overkill, but it’s wise to avoid putting all your eggs in the one basket. If there’s a problem with files on one service, you’ll always have copies to fall back on elsewhere. We would recommend you use at least two different services to store your personal files.
If you take lots of photos or videos on your phone or tablet, you can install apps for multiple services that back up the content automatically in the background over Wi-Fi. Some good examples to consider include Google Photos, Prime Photos and Flickr. Obviously, if you have multiple services running in the background and doing the same thing, it can temporarily slow down your internet connection and eat into your device’s battery life, but you probably won’t notice this most of the time, and can always toggle automatic backup off for one or more services if you do.
Having your content backed up automatically is definitely a smart move, because the one time you forget to do it is the one time you’ll lose your phone or tablet. You can also sync files between cloud services from your PC, just in case one option becomes unavailable, using Microsoft’s free tool SyncToy.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR
Forewarned is forearmed when a site is set to close and take its users’ data with it. Here’s what you should always check before you sign up
Before committing yourself and your data to a cloud service (especially if it isn’t from a well-known web name such as Google or Microsoft), you should always check to see how secure and reliable it is likely to be, and look out for catches and caveats.
For example, there may be limits on the maximum size of files you can upload, and there will probably be restrictions on the type of files you can store online (no program executables, for example).
It’s therefore very important to read the service’s terms and conditions and look out for anything potentially onerous. At all times, you should be the only person who owns your data, but it’s likely that the service provider will have the right to access, copy and modify your files. Don’t be overly concerned about this condition – it merely means the company can back up your files across different servers and convert them to a format for playing (with music and video files) or displaying (with images) correctly. Another common clause is that if you don’t access your files regularly (at least every 90 days), the company will assume you’re no longer using your free account and terminate it without warning. This may sound unfair, but it means the service isn’t wasting bandwidth on accounts containing huge files that will never be touched again.
If you’re buying a paid-for subscription, check to see what the conditions are for getting a refund in the event of you cancelling your plan or the company changing its terms or abandoning its service. Some paid-for plans let you go over your storage quota but will then charge you a monthly fee per gigabyte for doing so.
You should also look to see what safeguards the company puts in place to protect your files. Most cloud providers use a high level of encryption and have multiple copies of your data to prevent loss in the event of a drive or server failure. Often these copies will be stored at different locations so if one data centre is destroyed by a fire, flood, earthquake or some other disaster, your data will still be safe and accessible.
Finally, although you should obviously avoid entrusting your files to companies you’ve never heard of before, you should also be equally wary of big-name firms venturing into commercial cloud storage for the first time. History is littered with failed ventures from the likes of Symantec (Norton Zone), F-Secure (Younited) and Canonical (Ubuntu One).
Transfer your files between cloud services using Mover
1 Start by creating a free account on the Mover website (mover.io) – just enter an email address and password, and verify your details. You’ll be presented with a list of Source and Destination services. Click a service you want to move your files from – OneDrive, in this case. Click the option to authorise that account.
2 A new tab will open, and you’ll be prompted to enter a name for this new ‘connector’ (which is what Mover calls cloud services). Click Authorize, then log into that service with the relevant account details. Grant Mover permission to access your info. The content from that location will be shown under Source.
3 Repeat the process for the Destination service. We’ll sign into Dropbox. The files to copy over will be greyed out. You can choose to compress the files before transferring them. Click Start Copy to begin the process. You can switch from Migrate to Backup if you want to schedule backups/syncs.
How to back up your cloud data
1 You can sync files between cloud-service folders directly in Windows. Download and install SyncToy (bit.ly/synctoy392). Click Create New Folder Pair and browse for the folders you want (OneDrive and Google Drive, for example). Click Next, then select an action – Synchronize, Echo or Contribute. There are explanations for all three options.
2 Name the pairing ‘Cloud backup’ and click Finish. You can change the action and the options for that folder pair. This will let you exclude certain file types. Click Preview to see what actions will be performed (including copy, rename, overwrite and delete). Click Run to start the backup.
3 Mover can back up data between services. Select two connectors, then click Backup. You can archive contents and back up files using the incremental method (only changes are copied). You can receive an email when a backup has completed or failed. Set the schedule you require, then click Save Backup.