Experience with Carbonite? Other choices.

monkey44 wrote:
2oldman .....
SO, my question remains unanswered: What did we do with it before 'online storage' ... why is that suddenly 'unsafe' ... and in fact, how much of what we save online is really necessary in life. So, it's more about a waste of money than paranoid.

....

Many people used safety deposit boxes at banks to store "life's data" before online storage. So they made copies, had them certified and then stored them at the bank. The "cloud" is the new evolution of that process.

I have been in IT a long time and offsite storage of data backups has always been part of a good recovery plan. Starting in the days of tape storage there was always a copy moved offsite. Normally there were copies on site that was used first but in the case of fire (or one actual recovery I was part of a flood) the off site copy had to be brought in to recover the data.

Now for my personal stuff I do use a local backup to a drive that is encrypted and uncompressed. Then I compress and encrypt a copy of that drive and store it in the cloud. I have had to change providers due to a company closing. But still had that local copy during the switch in providers.

Some people do not trust encryption. But if you chose a long password or key it can be next to impossible to decrypt. There was a case that made national news a few years ago where the criminal was eventually convicted but refused to give up his password even with the court ordering him to (contempt of court charges were minor compared to what he was facing). They offered a plea bargain as a carrot but he always refused. The FBI had was not able to decrypt his information in the 5 years that they had it up to the time of the case finally going to trail. I am not sure if they were ever able to or if they just stopped trying. That proves that if used properly encryption can protect your data but it is also possible to circumvent encryption if weak passwords are used. Also the encryption needs to occur before transferring the data.

Again it comes back to the risk that you are willing to assume and what you feel the main threat is. If your main threat is to protect your pictures and such from a dead hard drive or accidental deletion then a locally stored back up is enough. Offsite backups protect you from things like fire, theft (they break in and steal the laptop and the external ssd drive), floods, other natural disasters, etc.

Sorry for the long post.

Mike