It’s probably also on his computer, but now inaccessible without the Microsoft account that contains the bitlocker key for that data

You know, like how fucking ransomware works

If it worked properly I would have no problem telling people to do that. You may show people how to back up to a hard disk, but they'll likely not do it. A service that does the backup automatically without the user having to do anything is very useful.

The problem is that it doesn't work properly.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is making it more and more difficult to actually save things to your local devices. OneDrive went from being just convenient cloud backup to "oh we're your hard drive now"

It's advertised as cloud storage and incredibly dependable. It business leaders tell people that the cloud is the best because they use it. What they fail to tell you is that you don't meyet to them and they will delete you for any reason.

When this all started all those years ago, I said to myself I’m not gonna trust any corporation to any of my stuff without a copy. Always used backup CD’s and hard drives, etc.

Storing your most important, irreplaceable pictures on someone else’s computer ONLY, with no control over them? That’s an insane practice.

But it's SOOOOOO convenient! I deserve the convenience! take my money, take my data, I am no weirdo and I need no privacy, just let me have convenience without having to think through anything at all!

external SSDs are reasonably cheap.

They're still not out of reach for most people, but the prices are crazy now. A Crucial 1TB that was $70 last August is more than double that now. That said, most people's data is worth far more than that.

I wouldn't buy an SSD for storage like that. It's more expensive than a hard drive, for being faster, but this is not your OS drive, you don't need that added performance. hard drives are plenty fast when you are just using it casually, without your operating system and various installed programs actively using it for lots of random reads. they are capable of 100 MB/s reads and writes, as fast but often faster than a gigabit internet connection, which is the maximum a common computer can handle. unless you got a HDD with SMR tech, which will become slower when used as an IT pro, but unless you use it in an array or you write extreme amounts to it at once, it's not going to be a problem.

Besides, SSDs also lose their data quicker when left unpowered for a long time. I really think they are a bad, ill-considered choice for that task. a choice driven by adverts.

The iPhone has 2FA enabled, or F-book?

3 separate backups

2 different media types

1 off-site

He just wanted to make sure Cortana has image-gen training data.