Computer on line back up

Try to find somebody who will still be in the business when you need to do a restore. That can be a tough guess, you may want to back up to more than one provider.

I've struggled with this on just the files most important to me, photos and images. Three of the five I've tried either got out of the business, changed the business model, or got acquired by somebody who changed the business. We had similar issues at corporate level, instability of offsite storage and disaster recovery providers.

mlts22 wrote:
Here is one issue about cloud providers:

1: Cloud provider is in business for a bit, and business "A" signs up and uses them for storage/backups. Said cloud provider has a security service level "guarantee" in place.

2: Cloud provider goes bankrupt.

3: The physical servers of the cloud provider are bought by business "B", business "A"'s main competitor.

4: Business "B" makes all the data public including social security numbers of employees, slurps all trade secrets, publishes all internal memos, and makes a press release about how poor business "A"'s security is.

5: Business "A" is hosed. They can't sue the cloud company because it is bankrupt. Business "B" has no contracts, so the data on the servers, they can do with it as they absolutely wish, as it is legally theirs now.

I've seen this more than a couple of times.

I would say that it is OK to use a provider like Mozy or Carbonite... but use the feature on their client to encrypt data with your own key before sending it up. That way, all data is stored encrypted and inaccessible to them, any hackers, or anyone who ends up owning the servers down the road.

For providers like Dropbox, I use a program called Truecrypt. I create a large container on my Dropbox partition, mount it to the computer, and store my files in that. If Dropbox gets compromised, the bad guys have an encrypted container and that's it. Since I use keyfiles, guessing passwords will be completely useless to them.

Finally, for "archive" storage like Amazon Glacier, I use PGP or GNU Privacy guard. All my critical documents, I copy to a ZIP file, encrypt that file with my private PGP key, then upload the encrypted file. Again, if someone hacks my AWS account, they will find a bunch of encrypted files that can't be decrypted by guessing passwords.

When I was contemplating online backups, they were all saying your information is encrypted at your computer before being stored on their servers. This would make it harder for Company B to share your information or abuse it. I would never use an online backup service that my information is not encrypted before leaving my computer.

Though there is nothing on this computer which I'd be embarrassed by should it become public. Still.. If it's on the cloud, it can "Rain down" on you when some hacker finds out your access codes.

If it's on the hard drive which is stored OFF LINE in a secure location.

Much harder to hack.

Op here...Thanks everybody. I learned something. For some reason I thought the cloud was the answer because there was nothing to keep locally or to lose or break down or get stolen.
Thanks for all the replies.

Another item, and this is experience I paid in blood to have: I have had every single backup medium fail on me. I've had CDs go bad, tapes go bad, hard disks fail, hard disk RAID controllers fail, trashing multiple disks, cloud storage places zeroing out my data due to a client glitch, and other storage places "forgetting" I had an account there.

When backing data up, have at least two different mediums. On my Mac, I use Time Machine to an encrypted external drive. I also use a tool called rsync to copy just the changed files from my documents folder to a mounted TrueCrypt container stored on Dropbox. This way, my documents are saved twice. One on the Time Machine drive, one on Dropbox. This way, if a thief steals my laptop and external drive, due to the encryption, it becomes "just" a hardware theft, as my data is protected, and I can just access the stuff stored on Dropbox via another machine. If my Dropbox account gets overwritten, I still have my original copy and my Time Machine copy. Finally, after tax season, I copy all my documents to DVDs and store those somewhere secure. I've never had to go to the DVDs (which are intended to be a last resort), but it is there if needed, and once a DVD is finalized, no malware on a computer can alter the data present.

Here is one issue about cloud providers:

1: Cloud provider is in business for a bit, and business "A" signs up and uses them for storage/backups. Said cloud provider has a security service level "guarantee" in place.

2: Cloud provider goes bankrupt.

3: The physical servers of the cloud provider are bought by business "B", business "A"'s main competitor.

4: Business "B" makes all the data public including social security numbers of employees, slurps all trade secrets, publishes all internal memos, and makes a press release about how poor business "A"'s security is.

5: Business "A" is hosed. They can't sue the cloud company because it is bankrupt. Business "B" has no contracts, so the data on the servers, they can do with it as they absolutely wish, as it is legally theirs now.

I've seen this more than a couple of times.

I would say that it is OK to use a provider like Mozy or Carbonite... but use the feature on their client to encrypt data with your own key before sending it up. That way, all data is stored encrypted and inaccessible to them, any hackers, or anyone who ends up owning the servers down the road.

For providers like Dropbox, I use a program called Truecrypt. I create a large container on my Dropbox partition, mount it to the computer, and store my files in that. If Dropbox gets compromised, the bad guys have an encrypted container and that's it. Since I use keyfiles, guessing passwords will be completely useless to them.

Finally, for "archive" storage like Amazon Glacier, I use PGP or GNU Privacy guard. All my critical documents, I copy to a ZIP file, encrypt that file with my private PGP key, then upload the encrypted file. Again, if someone hacks my AWS account, they will find a bunch of encrypted files that can't be decrypted by guessing passwords.

2oldman wrote:

Gdetrailer wrote:
I can't figure out why folks feel backing up to the internet or "cloud" is a good idea and even willing to PAY money for it.

Maybe they're not as paranoid as you are.

Or as smart. :)

Gdetrailer wrote:
I can't figure out why folks feel backing up to the internet or "cloud" is a good idea and even willing to PAY money for it.

Maybe they're not as paranoid as you are.

Happytraveler wrote:

2oldman wrote:
Cloud backups get a lot of bad press on here, but I don't see anything wrong with them IF you are not one to regularly back up your stuff, and then remove it from the house and keep it somewhere safe.

I don't think too many people actually do that.

I love iCloud for syncing all my devices, it's a very nice feature. I use Time Machine and Carbonite for backups.

Internet storage comes and goes, relying on anything OUTSIDE your own personal control is a recipe for disaster.

My own personal experience with internet online storage has been frustrating at best.

First one took my money, had intermittent connection issue, lost my data several times causing me to reload it at very slow speeds, then one day just disappeared altogether with NO TRACE. The only good thing was I was not using it for data backup, just was for hot linking sharing.

The next one I found for free and it worked great for 6 months then they changed the TOS WITHOUT notice that they no longer offered hot linking with "free" accounts. My data is still there but NO ONE can access it for "free" :M

I can't figure out why folks feel backing up to the internet or "cloud" is a good idea and even willing to PAY money for it. You don't know who these people are and where your data is stored but yet people are willing to hand over the "keys" to your life not to mention happily pay for it..

I backup to external hard drives, it is the ONLY secure and reliable way to go not to mention the cheapest..

2oldman wrote:
Cloud backups get a lot of bad press on here, but I don't see anything wrong with them IF you are not one to regularly back up your stuff, and then remove it from the house and keep it somewhere safe.

I don't think too many people actually do that.

I love iCloud for syncing all my devices, it's a very nice feature. I use Time Machine and Carbonite for backups.