I don’t use cloud storage for sensitive data. Quicken isn’t backed up to the cloud. I back it up at home.
The cloud only has video, audio and photos. Photos are also backed up at home.
The rest can be replaced if the cloud loses it.
It’s absolutely dangerous. Even if they start with excellent encryption and security and honest employees, that can and will change over time.
I think that’s the intended use of most cloud storage sites. You sync your local storage with the cloud, allowing the cloud to back up your data and copy it to your other computers. Except maybe on smartphones and tablets.
I don’t necessarily disagree but that means that every ERP vendor, Oracle, SAP, etc is putting their client’s data at risk as they all are pushing their customers to the cloud.
How do you feel about keeping your money in a bank? Or handing your credit card to a waiter?
That was a long-ass time ago, with a different company (Microsoft purchased Danger, it wasn’t an original MS project), with a completely different system and a completely different product.
And, the data was recovered (at least mostly according to the wiki page).
If the bank gets robbed or burns down, my account balance can be reconstructed. Unlike my personal photos, one dollar is just as good as another dollar.
If the waiter goes on a shopping spree, a phone call to the issuing bank makes all those charges go away; my dollars aren’t at risk.
Curious, are you including login names and passwords to financial accounts on this google drive? If not, then I’m unsure what could really happen. Even account names and numbers can only get you so far. It is really difficult to steal assets with only a name and account number. Most financial institutions have pretty good security and without specific login and passwords, you’d get shut down pretty quickly.
But still, it was a trusted custodian of data and it let people down. It isn’t about the probability or technology, it’s about “it can happen even if you trust them.”
But if someone hacks into your bank’s system, or an insider steals its data, you could be subject to identity theft that could take years to unwind.
No. I keep those in keepass. I keep financial statements, copies of birth certificates, Medicare cards, social security cards, etc.
As a result of this thread, I’ve changed the account password to a pass phrase that is ridiculously long, has almost certainly never been uttered by a human before, and contains special characters and numbers. It does not reference batteries, horses, or staplers. I also have 2 factor authentication on but that’s not new.
I guess I don’t really understand the significance of what you’re saying, if not to impeach Microsoft’s services. Your data isn’t safer from loss if you don’t use online storage, as the average person’s backup habits are at best poor and more often nonexistent. Likewise, your money isn’t safer if you avoid banks. Quite the opposite, actually.
I trust that Google, Apple, and Dropbox are going to do a lot better at (a) not losing my data and (b) not leaking my data than anything else I could come up with short of lengths like keeping all my data in hard copies or multiple off-site air-gapped computers.
Google and Amazon already have my private medical records, financial records, and pretty much everything else.
It’d be a little short-sighted for me to be overly concerned about the security of my own personal documents housed in a similar fashion.
And yes, I get that it doesn’t mean that those things are safe. But, we’re all collectively rolling the dice that we’ll manage to operate our society in this way without nefarious people succeeding in bringing it to a screeching halt. I choose to use 2 factor authentication, trust in the big players, and not worry about worst case scenarios.
My OneDrive files are also on my computers. I also back them up to CrashPlan.
I voted “safe,” but that’s because anything I put in the cloud that is important is encrypted.
Good luck getting out of the banking system, so deeply ingrained after hundreds of years. Banks have proven reliable, so I don’t overly worry about them, though I am still concerned about new ways my details and funds could be compromised. If it really does seem as big a risk to keep my funds in a bank as not, then I’d probably consider changing, but as is, odds are good. But with the cloud, it’s new, it’s proven unreliable from the get-go, and I can’t see that changing all that much. One day even Google will be dead and replaced, and it will be sooner than you think. Facebook already seems to be on a downturn, and nobody would’ve predicted that happening so quickly. It’s not that I don’t trust them, I am no conspiracy theorist, it’s that they are unreliable.
I have a file server that syncs to a Dropbox Pro account.
One copy on the file server in case AWS (where Dropbox is hosted) goes titsup.
One (well… multiple) copies on Dropbox in case the house burns down.
I know enough about the underlying storage infrastructure that Dropbox uses from my own professional experience to be reasonably confident in the security and durability of the data I put out there. If somebody manages to crack the crypto on S3 buckets, my vacation photos and tax returns are going to be pretty far down the list of loot.
The local file server makes a decent enough backup, but it’s mostly for speed of access for devices that don’t have local copies of the Dropbox repository. Also so we can watch movies if my ISP goes down.
My point about the data loss was not to impeach Microsoft in particular but to simply point out a fact in response to “You’d like to think Microsoft won’t ever fuck up like MySpace just did, but there’s no reason it couldn’t happen.”
My point about banks was in response to “I don’t trust the cloud with anything.” I raised the question of banks, because if you don’t trust the cloud with anything, I don’t know how you can trust banks with anything, or anything with anything. There is nothing magical about banks that make them impervious to hacks compared with a big cloud service like AWS, who runs federally certified cloud services. The significance of my comment was that avoiding cloud storage is the data equivalent of storing your cash in a mattress.
It might seem like I’m playing both ends against the middle but the bottom line is that no company hosting your data in the cloud is infallible or impenetrable, but they’re still better than trusting your own single hard drive and maybe your one backup drive.