If you are going to use it enough to pay for it sure. But that’s always been the case.

The main benefits of cloud are it’s ability to scale quickly, it’s ability to provide geographic reach and the conversation of capex to opex.

They are backups, you potentially get copy’s of the data in multiple locations across continents.

BUT I agree, you are relying on them entirely for it. Lots of vendor tie in stuff in the industry unfortunately.

With some of the cloud providers, their built in backups are linked to the resource. So even if you have super duper geo-zone redundant backups for years, they still get nuked if you drop the server.

It’s always felt a bit stupid, but the backups can still normally be restored by support.

Sorry, brain fart moment.

I meant online only - the complete opposite of what I wrote …

I want to be able to upload files and have them stored on the server and only downloaded when needed (or if I mark them as always downloaded)

I don’t need or want everything on my laptop or phone (requires lots of storage!), but want to be able to get them easily when I do.

It doesn’t support offline online only files though. I can’t dump a few hundred GB on there and then access it from my phone etc

It looks like an add

Status page: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

Most tier lists are probably paid