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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

My approach is to make my PC disposable. With all cloud services its a lot easier than it used to be. IE

* Working code in github

* Photos in offline multiple HDD

* Docs in cloud servers and important ones printed out.

This way I dont really care if I get a virus, or gets stolen, or destroyed in fire or HDD crash etc. I actually locked myself out of my encrypted laptop and it didnt really matter - I just reinstalled everything.

I also think anti-virus is more trouble than its worth now, but am more assured as above.

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> This way I dont really care if I get a virus, or gets stolen...

If you get infected with a keylogger or a backdoor tool you're going to care. It doesn't matter how encrypted your hard drive is.

Practically speaking, how many key loggers and backdoor tools are detected by AV?

Not a bad approach, but if you have a virus that hasn't "shown itself" yet, then it could infect or otherwise corrupt the back up HDD's, right?

My approach as well, except I don't deal with offline HDD, I keep all my photos in Google Photos, offline docs in Google Drive.

Unless you are a professional film editor or photographer there is no need for RAW images (and even then, it's arguable), which is the main space sucker. The $10 a month to have Google manage it all for me is totally worth it.

This is what I have been trending towards as a matter of practicality. I want all of my devices to be thin clients.

Why would you have bothered encrypting the laptop if everything is in the cloud/elsewhere anyway?

You would still want to encrypt since sensitive data might be cached on the hard drive in plain text or credentials stored in an insecure way.

In case it gets stolen. But you're right if I'm worried about that I should be worried about getting a virus that steals my files.

reminds me I often enjoy virustotal as a serious check for some files.

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