Back Up Your Computer Online -- NOT!

Has anyone else noticed the recent influx of commercials prompting us to back up our computer information online. Here is a popular on for Carbonite.



How about no. This just a no brainer for me as I'm sure it is most of you. There is no way that I am voluntarily uploading the contents on my computer to the Internet. Not because I have terribly secretive things, but simply because it is easier and cheaper to back up your information yourself to external drives and with services like LogMeIn.com, you can even do it offsite.

I am not implying that LogMeIn.com is foolproof and secure, but it's better than voluntarily uploading EVERYTHING to some random backup site.

Remote Backup is a wise idea to prevent catastrophic data loss due to events like fire, theft, sabotage, etc.

However, I wouldn't recommend Online Backups either, for security and privacy reasons.

For Mission Critical Data, you Mirror all your drives, you Mirror all your Servers, and you sneaker-net your backup tapes/drives/thumbsticks to a Safety Deposit Box on a rotating schedule.

For non-Mission Critical Data (your home computers), I personally have all my computers at home sync with a home server. Then I have the home server sync with a co-located server that I keep elsewhere. The co-located server is locked in a chassis with intrusion detection, and has triple encryption on boot up. For most people though, this would be overkill.

For most people, take an image of your harddrive on DVD-ROM or Thumbdrive and either keep it with you at all times or take it to a friends/work whatever...anywhere but where your computer is physically located. Just be sure to ENCRYPT the contents lest snooping friends/co-workers/bosses might want to take a peek.

reply to post by glitchinthematrix


i know, i know - stupidest idea ever! who on earth is going to spend the time uploading all their important and possibly private data onto the internet? You can be sure that its easy to hack from the outside and totally open from the inside.

but then you do know that windows has more backdoors than a diy merchants! the internet had more rootkits and trojans floating around than space has stars. All your data goes via about a dozern unsecure locations, even the 512 bit encription can be broken in minuets by anyone that cares.

Computers aren't a safe place for data, if you have anything really important then don't plug it into the internet.