Nothing online can ever be guaranteed 100% safe from being lost, but in regards to file storage there are some sites that have stood the test of time.
A site that I've been using for over 10 years is
. They used to offer 50 GB of space for free, but that's since been reduced to 20 GB.
I signed up in the early days using 10 different email accounts which gave me 500 GB of free storage. It's important to visit them regularly because accounts with no activity after a few months get deleted. I also clear my cache and cookies between visits so they don't see that they're all linked to 1 user.
I'm also careful what links I share from MEGA because they're strict with copyright protected sharing, but for storage with no download links you can upload anything, and (they claim) it's private and encrypted and that they have no idea what those files are.
In ten years I've never lost a file or had it removed.
Another decent online option is
.
I've got files on there dating back 10+ years, but they do check for copyright and disable any files you upload with protection. A workaround is to zip up the file first and make sure it has a password. I don't use it as much as I probably should, I've had very few issues.
A newer storage option is
.
Obviously it's main usage is as a social media platform, but it also offers unlimited cloud storage.
The best way to use it for that is with an account that doesn't make groups or channels. You can still join groups you like, have private chats and share media etc, but if you have a channel that gets taken down or reported, your account gets heavily restricted and occasionally deleted.
I store large files on there that I don't access that often and just forget about them.
As for local storage, back-ups are important. I've had 2 hard drive failures in the past. The first one happened due to a dodgy wire connection and the whole drive was RAW formatted. Luckily I recovered 80% of it using a disc recovery program.
The second failure hurts the most. 1 terabyte of some seriously rare celebrity content. There were old website rips, leaks, all my back-ups from my YouTube channels that got taken down, same with my Twitter back-ups, all sorts of gems dating back to the early 2000's that have long since disappeared from the web. I don't know exactly what happened, but a Seagate drive it was all stored on had a technical failure and I can't access any of it now. I've tried every disc repair and recovery analyzer I can find, but nothing has worked. I don't think it's been formatted but recovering what's on it has been impossible.
I never use Seagate hardware now. Western Digital external hard drives are my go-to, they seen pretty robust.
