Backing up data online help!

The above suggestions all work, but I think we can do better if we learn more the situation you are in. As always the more we know the more we can help, details, details, details. . . .

How much data are you looking to backup?
Is it all on one computer? External Drives, NAS? Multiple Computers?
How important is security?
Are you willing to pay? If so how much?
What is your internet connection speed?
Are you looking to just backup a folder, or all the files on all hard drives?

Once we get these answered I can go into more detail. I will say this, I use Backblaze and am pretty happy with them. Crashplan is another good service, especially if you have multiple computers you want to cover or someone like your parents computers you want to cover. Many of these services are similar, but there are some key differences that set them apart.

1. Approximately 200 gbs of data ranging from videos, photos, Office/pdf documents.
2. Pretty much one computer. Looking at getting another external hard drive. Some data is stored at my work computer and my wife's work laptop.
3. Pretty important for some, not as much with others. If someone stole photos from my 30th birthday party, I would not lose sleep over it. If they took tax documents, that would be worrisome. I guess more focus on not losing the data rather than potential exposure to getting the data.
4. Prefer to pay nothing but would like to hear about some paid options just to compare.
5. Comcast cable modem.
6. Select folders.

Let me know if you have more questions. Name, rank, serial #? Thanks!

I would look at splitting the data between photos and other stuff that if it got out it would not be as big of a deal as say tax documents.

The other set like the tax documents I would backup to a drive / cd / dvd and store somewhere other then your home/ office.

Also I would look at the user agreements on what rights to the data do you have I know they can be tricky and you might give up all rights to the data.

1. Approximately 200 gbs of data ranging from videos, photos, Office/pdf documents.
2. Pretty much one computer. Looking at getting another external hard drive. Some data is stored at my work computer and my wife's work laptop.
3. Pretty important for some, not as much with others. If someone stole photos from my 30th birthday party, I would not lose sleep over it. If they took tax documents, that would be worrisome. I guess more focus on not losing the data rather than potential exposure to getting the data.
4. Prefer to pay nothing but would like to hear about some paid options just to compare.
5. Comcast cable modem.
6. Select folders.

Let me know if you have more questions. Name, rank, serial #? Thanks!

Also how about placing the files in a truecrypt or Free OTFE vol. before uploading it to the cloud.

I think it is not the case with dropbox. (but i am not a comp.sci guy)

dropbox even doesn't have to sync-up all the truecrypt container when only a part of it change.
dropbox can know if truecrypt file change if you uncheck “preserve modification time of file containers” in truecrypt preferences. dropbox then only sync difference, so when you add a 2MB file to your 1GB truecrypt container, only 2MB is uploaded to the clound.

http://lifehacker.com/5527055/the...-not-using

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-wa...the-cloud/

http://webcache.googleusercontent...clnk&gl=us

http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-351.htm
Steve: Yeah. And again, we're not going to beat this thing to death. But I wanted to spend this time to give people, like, an overview. Certainly cloud security matters. And I'm hoping, I mean, I know that we have some effect, at least on the little guys, that is, this podcast does, because I've gotten feedback from everybody. I mean, it matters. And I just want them to do the security right. It's just not hard. It's just - mostly it takes caring about it. All the technology is there.
So I want to wrap up by talking about this compared to TrueCrypt because TrueCrypt is the granddaddy of filesystem encryption. And there's been some confusion about how these types of solutions interface with TrueCrypt, and how TrueCrypt can be used in the cloud. And TrueCrypt is fundamentally different because TrueCrypt, the way you would use TrueCrypt in the cloud is you would create a container file on your hard drive, and this would be a fixed size. So you need to allocate 10GB, which once upon a time was insane, but now we all have terabytes. So you create a container file to hold the filesystem. Then you use TrueCrypt to encrypt the filesystem in that container file. And then you put that container file in the cloud.

Now, once, initially, you're doing a 10GB upload, that is, the entire container that is a TrueCrypt filesystem goes off to the cloud, 10GB, there it goes. Even if it's empty, 10GB because, when TrueCrypt encrypts it, it turns the entire thing into noise. It all looks like it's got data in it. So off it goes, 10GB. Once it finally gets there, then, if we assume that your client, the client that's managing this cloud service for you, is intelligent, and lots of them are, they're only going to update tiny portions of this large file, if that's all that changed. Almost all of them that have matured look at the file that they've got versus the file that you've got. And when you make a few changes, they only send those up.

So the beauty of TrueCrypt is that, when you make some changes in your TrueCrypt volume, it's like sectors or clusters on the hard drive. Only those clusters that are about the files you're changing and the metadata, like the directory system and timestamps and things, only those change. So they're relatively small incremental changes to the whole 10GB, for example, TrueCrypt volume. And those get shuttled up to the cloud, and then you're synchronized.

Now, the problem with TrueCrypt is it really wasn't designed for this application. We're sort of stretching it that way. And I have heard, and I have said, and it's since been confirmed, that you cannot leave the TrueCrypt volume mounted. That is, TrueCrypt acquires exclusive ownership of this volume file and won't share it with the cloud client. So it's necessary after doing things to unmount, to dismount the volume from TrueCrypt. Then the cloud storage thing can see that it is available and changed and make the updates. So it's not as transparent.

The other problem is, even if you stored nothing in the 10GB TrueCrypt volume, you've still stored 10GB in the cloud because basically you're storing a whole drive in the cloud. So you're paying for it, even if it's empty. That's where these file-by-file systems have the advantage that basically you're storing encrypted versions of your file. The downside of doing that is you can see that there are files, and there are directories. They've got cryptographic names, but you can sort of - there is some leakage of this metadata, timestamps and structures of the file system. Now, I don't know that that is a big concern. But the beauty of TrueCrypt is there is nothing that anybody can tell from the outside of this blob. They can't tell how many files, how big they are, what's going on. They could detect that you changed something, if they were watching really closely. But it's just random changes, literally random changes, of this big blob, so it doesn't really get them anywhere.

So, I mean, TrueCrypt is maybe the ultimate TNO. There are people using it. They are using it in the cloud. They say, yes, you've got to unmount the volume for it to update. But they like the fact that it is TrueCrypt. And we've talked about it. We've been discussing it in various contexts for years. It's very solid. On the other hand, there's nothing unsolid about these file-by-file systems. And, frankly, that's the approach I take. I'm doing the file-by-file approach rather than the big homogenous drive that TrueCrypt creates.

So I think we're done for now. I'll keep my eye...