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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Quick question for HN'ers... does anyone actually feel safe using cloud services for personal data storage?

In the interest of full disclosure... I can barely muster trust enough for gmail. Actually, I don't trust gmail, which is why I don't use it for anything important or personal. I certainly would not put my child's photos onto a cloud service and expect them to be safe. And from what I understand, these people put, not only their data on iCloud, but their ACTUAL DEVICES are administrable from iCloud. That seems insane to me. It seems that this is the inevitable result of any such system.

I guess I am just a bit surprised at the surprise being expressed here. USB drives are not THAT horrible are they? They seem, to me, far more reliable backup methods.

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The "funny" thing here is that the guy didn't host his photos on the cloud, he hosted them on his Mac. It was a command to the cloud to remote wipe his Mac that caused his photos to disappear. If he had hosted them on the cloud somewhere, they would have likely been backed up at some point.

I use GMail. The convenience is worth the risk, and I think Google have a pretty good understanding of security - much better than Apple has shown here, for instance. Remote wiping sounds like a step too far, but I back up to an external hard drive, so a remote wipe wouldn't be disastrous.

Just me but I've had a lot of external hardrives fail, and zero files lost on dropbox, google drive, and iCloud over the years. So... YMMV

I choose to just double up on cloud services as a "backup"

Seems like Tahoe-LAFS deserves mention here. I haven't gotten around to trying it myself, but as I understand, it stores encrypted shards of your data on multiple cloud providers, so your data can't be compromised and no one provider can cause it to be lost.

EDITED to add link: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs

Tarsnap? Yes.

... That's about it.

I use gmail, but I don't trust it, and have been looking for an excuse to get away from it for a while.

I use Blackblaze for Desktop backup and Rsync.net for important data. I have reasonable confidence in these two services, as my data is encrypted at rest, and I have at least some control over the keys.

I'm not very comfortable with other cloud services.

>does anyone actually feel safe using cloud services for personal data storage?

For me, it's a balancing act. I find it hard to manage backups. I don't want to run a RAID setup at home. I really like the convenience of Dropbox and S3.

What do you trust for email? I sleep a lot better knowing it's Google and Time Warner or Comcast. Collocation? I wonder how hard it is to talk a colo facility into access to an arbitrary rack.

You need to have your stuff backed up to the cloud (in case your house burns down) and to a USB drive (in case your account is compromised). Neither is adequate by itself.

I hear the "if your house burns down" line often and I can't tell if it's meant literally in this context. I'd think that at least for most regular folks, if their house and everything in it was turned to ashes, the last thing they'd cry over would be their, say, iTunes collection or mostly useless email archives hoarded over the last ten years.

It's more likely they'd be upset over losing photos of their child growing up, for instance. Or if they've digitized, say, financial records.

I mean, yeah, obviously the primary concern would be "oh my god my house burnt down." But if you can minimize the repercussions by putting digital stuff which is important to you offsite, maybe that's something to be relieved about.

It's one of several things that could happen (fire, flood, burglary, other natural disasters depending on where you live etc., lots of ways to lose all data at a location).

But yes, I mean it literally. Insurance may pay to replace your house. But a portfolio of a few years of work, the text of your half-finished novel, photographs of your children growing up, the final e-mails you exchanged with your uncle who died of cancer? No insurance money will ever replace those.

I use Mozy for full backup and Google Drive + Picasa for photos and videos. Hopefully both of them wouldn't fail me at once.

I do store some sensitive stuff on Dropbox, but inside an encrypted disk image (I'm on a Mac).

Tarsnap and Spideroak, that's about it right now.

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