#file storage

While I strongly recommend keeping local backups of your files on your computer, external hard drives, flash drives, CD/DVD-RWs, etc, it's also a good idea to back up your files online! Here's a list of file storing sites where you can back stuff up for free. Spreading your files across different storage sites may make things more complicated but can also keep from ever having to pay for expanded storage space on any of them. Also, storing your files online creates an easy to share them with friends or publicly on the internet!

Site list is below!

https://app.mediafire.com/ File storage site I've been using since the 2000s! They give you up to 50 GB of free file storage space.

https://www.google.com/drive/ Google Drive allows you to use 15 GB of online storage for free. You can also save links to other people's google drive folders in your main directory, making them easier to find again later.

https://www.dropbox.com/home Drop box gives you 2 GB of free storage. Much smaller than some of the others, but every bit counts when you want to save money!

https://www.4s.io/ 4shared gives you 15 GB of free storage space!

https://mega.io/ MEGA will give you 20 GB of storage space free!

https://archive.org/ Internet Archive is a very good place for storing things such as writings, art, audio, software, videos., etc. All posts are public so this site is ideal for making backups of finished works that you want to show off/keep safe. They run off of donations so if you use their site for storage please consider throwing some cash their way!

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The Following Sites are places where you can archive your video game mods and maps!

https://www.moddb.com/ Mod.db is a nice community where you can archive and share your maps and mods, storage space is unlimited!

https://gamebanana.com/ Gamebanana is rather messy in my opinion, but is still another great place for archiving and sharing game mods/maps you have created!

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/ Steam Workshop mods can't just be freely downloaded from a web browser, so I consider it inferior to gamebanana and mod.db. Still, it can be another good place to archive mods and maps you made for games that have workshop support! It does tend to ease the installation process for mods, but people who got the game from another store may not be able to get your mods!

I often say how complex technology has gotten, but I rarely dig into what that means in a practical sense. So instead of reporting on the usual daily array of vulnerabilities and flaws, I’m going to share a personal incident from yesterday.

I’m a gamer in my free time, with Steam as my preferred platform. I bought my current computer back in 2018. It was running Windows 10, and came equipped with the RAM necessary to run the games I wanted, with the OneDrive storage all Microsoft products have these days. I have since upgraded the OS to 11, installed an additional hard drive, and partitioned the original to make better use of the space.

Fast forward to a month ago, when my OneDrive was nearly full and I was getting repeated error messages concerning it. The only option I was given was to upgrade to a paid service to increase my storage. Which frankly, I didn’t want. Call me old school, but I want my files stored and accessible on the actual hard drive of my device, not in some nebulous space I can’t control. So I unlinked my account from the cloud. And voila! Things were running smoothly again with no error messages. Or so I thought.

Yesterday, one of my games underwent routine maintenance. Normal behavior. Then I got a popup from my antivirus software, claiming it found a threat. Okay, not a huge deal. That’s why I have it. Except it wasn’t actually a threat, it was a known bug that makes my antivirus think a crash reporter is malware. Not hard to fix.

Then I noticed the game update had failed. ‘Missing downloaded files’, it said. Again, not hard to troubleshoot. I followed the instructions of a tutorial, and hit update again. The issue recurred. I tried at least three more times to update the game, with no success. I’d reached the point where only uninstalling the Steam client and re-downloading it was going to fix things, because no, I was not going to turn off my firewall to ensure a download. That is an irresponsible option when you consider just how many phishing campaigns start exactly that way.

So, I went into Settings to find and uninstall. Steam wasn’t there.

After some confused noises and swearing, I decided to try and download the Steam client anyway, just to see if it would work. It did. I even saved it in the same location it should have been (the folder itself was still there). No conflict, no alert that I was overwriting anything. 2FA is enabled, so I had to go through that to log into my Steam account. I received an email regarding a login from a new device. Why was this activation treating itself as new when it was in the same location, at the same IP address?

To be clear, the platform had been functioning. I have a taskbar shortcut to the dashboard, and all my games were accounted for and playable. I had no idea anything was wrong until this routine maintenance update. In fact, the last one went off without a hitch, and that was only a month ago or so. I remembered the March Patch Tuesday issue, where some MS Teams and OneDrive logins were failing due to a glitch in the code that told people they weren’t connected to the internet. But that wasn’t the issue I was having. It made no sense.

With my brand new copy of the client downloaded, I moved on to checking my library. Lo and behold, nearly half of my games had updates queued. And the game in question that started this whole mess wasn’t even installed. This morning, with everything finally working properly, I got the missing piece of the puzzle.

Failure to sync with the cloud.

Evidently, when I unlinked OneDrive, a number of save files became inaccessible. They were still present, in the local files. But I had to manually go through each game that had a problem and change them from cloud to local storage. Which begs the question: why is cloud storage the default? And a follow up question: why were only some of them stored there? And most importantly: why did the Steam client not have a local file? The cloud is supposed to be a copy.

I’m the first to say that I work in cybersecurity, not IT. They are separate, albeit related, fields. Fixing this was a mix of online tutorials and a working knowledge from a lifetime of doing my own troubleshooting. But it sheds a bright spotlight on how layered and complex something that should be simple has become. I talk a lot about if/then in coding. Computers have built in redundancies for exactly this reason, but apparently no longer have the commands to automatically revert to local if the cloud isn’t connected. The average user would likely never figure this out without dealing with customer support, that itself might not know how to help.

I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story; it was just a frustrating example of how convoluted dealing with technology is. But maybe it will serve someone else experiencing a similar technical issue. And if that’s the case, then I consider the time well spent.

Tell me when you know where to find All the love we left behind It's a long way back Tell me when you know it's too late 'Cause the Devil got away And the line has gone flat - You Can Do Better, Blacklite District

(for personal use but suggestions very welcome as I’m looking to expand the list, my only real requirements are that it’s 100% free (OR has a usable 100% free version that’s not just a free trial and doesn’t require credit card info or anything else that would force you to pay under certain circumstances) and that it’s trustworthy/not sketchy)

Basically just a bunch of links to different useful forums and tech resources, warez, downloads, etc.