Do You Own Where Your Digital Files are Stored?

What would happen if your Google docs disappeared? Or if the material on whatever online publishing platform you use (Medium, Substack, Ghost, etc.) goes away? Or if those accounts got shut down?

Creating, sharing, and storing content in the cloud can be so easy. And while it’s mostly safe, there is some risk. How can you protect your information?

Keep backups in a place you own and control.

I publish on Medium. It’s a great platform for sharing my messages and expanding my audience.

I use Google Drive daily. It’s a convenient way to access documents from various devices and share information with others who need it.

But I also regularly download those files to my computer’s hard drive (actually, a three-drive RAID array), which is then automatically backed up to my Backblaze account. 

My critical data is stored on digital real estate that I own.

A recent article in Freelance Writer’s Report reminded me of how important this is. It shared the experience of a group of romance authors who had been writing their manuscripts in Google Docs. Their stories were apparently pretty steamy. When Google realized it, their accounts were shut down because the content violated Google's terms of service. The authors couldn’t access their work and they didn’t have their files backed up.

Not only did that situation emphasize the importance of redundant backups, it also provides the important reminder to make sure you read and understand the terms of service of any platform you use. When the platform belongs to someone else, the owner (or the lawyers or policymakers) gets to decide what can be stored on their servers. Be sure you know when and why your account could be closed or your data deleted. 

Take a look at all the online platforms you use. Set up systems so that if you suddenly couldn’t access the information on them, you could still quickly and easily recover that data from one or more backup resources you control.