Cloud Storage

Ralph Cramden wrote:
I have been trying for years to get the room sealed 100% where I try to store my clouds, but those pesky clouds always seem to find a crack or something. They're also extremely hard to catch to begin with.

And this is exactly why cloud storage is best left to the professionals :w.

Dave

Another good way to protect your online bank account is to initiate two-step authorization for signing in. This will make it extremely difficult or impossible for a bad guy to get into your account.

I have been trying for years to get the room sealed 100% where I try to store my clouds, but those pesky clouds always seem to find a crack or something. They're also extremely hard to catch to begin with.

All the suggestions of using either a USB drive or a NAS are great as long as you have the USB drive or the NAS backed up somewhere off-site. USB drives and mirrored drives in NAS devices can fail, get stolen or lost in a catastrophic event (fire, flood, etc.). I use a Synology NAS for backing up my PCs and my Macs (Time Machine for Macs and ShadowProtect Desktop for the PCs). Imaged based and automatic, I do not worry about losing a hard drive or an entire device as I can do a bare metal restore to new hardware. The difference in my setup is my Synology NAS data is automatically encrypted and synced to a BackBlaze B2 account. In case of the aforementioned catastrophic loss, I still have all of my data located off-site at BackBlaze. I have a little over 1TB of data at BackBlaze costing about $7.00 per month. I also have the option of syncing my data with multiple off-site accounts (Google, S3, Microsoft, etc.) providing more redundancy. No matter what happens to my devices or my on-site backup, my data is safe.

joebedford wrote:

missnmountains wrote:
Western Digital's Mycloud 4TB hooks right up to your router. We can access ours from anywhere. All password protected.

Ken

Did you have to open up a port on your router or do you access it through a WD site?

It is automatic. You have an app to access it. I use MacBook, iPad, and iPhone. Install the app and it will log into it for you after setting up your login and password. You then have access to all of your files.

Ken

I have a QNAP with 2x2TB drives in it for redundancy. I can access it via QNAP's website, an app on my iPhone, or an app on my PC. It works great. I don't keep sensitive data on it though, just pictures, recipes, documents for reference, etc. Of course i have about $500 in it.

Qnap Home user

They make different models and they do TONS more than just file storage.

Synology makes a great product that does the exact same stuff also. I have used them with success too.

Just a thought.

If you don't want to spend money, i'd recommend Google Drive also.

@magicbus:

No, I do not think that online banking is "cloud banking".

sherlock62 wrote:

magicbus wrote:
For those who use cloud storage services. Do you encrypt your "important" files or just "trust the cloud force" to protect them? Having researched large cloud service companies for potential use for hosting banking software we were a little surprised to learn where protection boundaries lay and what we had to add in the form of self-defense.

Dave

Banking software data files and or backups of said data files (example Quickbooks or Quicken data files) are always encrypted by the software that spits them out. I have no reservation housing such files on Microsoft One Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox. As for other documents, they can be easily encrypted before cloud storage. Pic files I do not encrypt.

I'm sure most user's of this forum are caught up in a time warp, so positive comments here in regard to cloud storage will be lacking.

I encourage all here to break from the time warp. Online Banking, Cloud Storage and such are used by millions and millions who rant about such offerings in the year 2017.

As for me I have been using online banking to include bill pay and also cloud storage for well over 20 years and never an issue. Yes, I use precautions and am vigilant for issues.

-

Yikes, I hope you don't think online banking is "cloud" banking :B There maybe some, but I am not aware of any bank that is deploying their banking software on the public cloud. I see many considering private/on-premise cloud services which I believe are a great use of software/hardware resources. As I stated, we looked at using a cloud service to "host" our banking software and decided it was not secure enough without a lot of extra security wrapped around the product. Trust me that I couldn't find any of our customers who would feel comfortable saying "gee, sorry we had a breach, but it's the cloud vendor's fault." The customers who run our banking software want their data in-house, under their direct control so that they can take responsibility for it.

As for the statement that "data files and or backups of said data files (example Quickbooks or Quicken data files) are always encrypted by the software that spits them out". I do know that Excel and Word that I use to capture a variety of information someone would need to know if I was hit by a truck, do not encrypt all data before "spitting it out" (sic). Quickbooks/Quicken may now require encryption, I don't use either, but prefer to roll my own tracking software.

Dave

missnmountains wrote:
Western Digital's Mycloud 4TB hooks right up to your router. We can access ours from anywhere. All password protected.

Ken

Did you have to open up a port on your router or do you access it through a WD site?

Western Digital's Mycloud 4TB hooks right up to your router. We can access ours from anywhere. All password protected.

Ken