It's good to keep a cloud backup of all of your files, but are free cloud services trustworthy or safe to use? After all, we all know that you get what you pay for, and when it's free, is it secure? You might opt to host your own storage, but the likes of Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and more are cloud services that you can get for free by default or pay to get more storage.

Aside from limited security features and potential privacy concerns, free cloud storage is just as safe

Arguably, it can be more safe than hosting your own

Cloud storage services like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox are pretty safe. While the old adage of getting what you pay for holds true, the truth is that these companies profit off of you in other ways. On top of that, these companies use encryption to protect the files in your storage so that even in the event of a breach, a hacker wouldn't be able to see what you're keeping saved online.

However, some free services will have limited security features or lack backup and recovery options. For example, Google Drive does have two-factor authentication and the company keeps backups that it can restore for users, but there's no control given to the end-user over those backups. You would need to backup your files manually and either keep them on other cloud services, on your own storage drives, or in your own cloud backup alternative.

But what if a company experiences a catastrophic failure, like damage to a data center? Thankfully, companies operate with redundancy so that the data is still available somewhere else, even if the machine that your data was stored in was damaged or destroyed. Even if it's a free service, all of the big free cloud providers do it, meaning that you don't need to worry about losing your files. You should still keep local backups just in case, but you can rest assured your files will practically always be fine.

Is it better to use your own cloud storage?

Probably not, but maybe in some instances

For most people, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and others, are all significantly safer than relying on your own storage services through the likes of Nextcloud or otherwise. An off-site backup is always safe to have, and you should subscribe to the 3-2-1 rule of backups to ensure your data is kept completely safe. If you're unfamiliar with the 3-2-1 backup rule, here's a quick breakdown:

• 3 data copies.
• 2 storage devices.
• 1 backup stored off-site.

Create at least three copies of your data. Store all the copies on two storage devices, and keep one off-site. A storage device could be a desktop PC, a NAS, an external drive, or a cloud storage service. The latter could also count as an off-site location due to it being outside your home or office. This protects your data completely, and companies will adhere to this backup paradigm, too.

However, where your NAS can be just as good is if you pair it with something like Amazon S3 Glacier. It's a cloud storage medium that's designed to be accessed infrequently. Unlike Google Drive, where you may pay a fee and you can access your files whenever, Glacier's costs come when you retrieve your data. Hence why it's called "Glacier," as your data is basically frozen on a server.

For example, Amazon's S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs $0.00099 per GB per month, meaning that 200GB of data will cost you just $0.20 to keep it there for the month. You can only access that data once or twice a year, and you then pay $0.02 per GB to retrieve it. There are more flexible plans nad other options available, but by and large these are the kinds of plans that you'll be working with for long-term safe storage that costs less.

In other words, if you're using free cloud storage, then that's more than good enough for most people. If you want to host your own service, you can, but to make it just as safe and secure, you'll need to put in a lot of work to protect your data.