Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: With Whom Do You Entrust Your Long Term Data?
jppiiroinen writes: F-Secure, a company based in Finland, has sold its cloud storage business to a U.S. company (Synchronoss Technologies, Inc) speculated to have ties to the NSA. In previous, public announcements, they used arguments equivalent to, "trust us, your data will be safe." Now, it's likely F-Secure simply realized that competing against the big players, such as Google and Dropbox, didn't make much sense.
But it makes me wonder: Whom do you trust with your data? And who really owns it? What about in 3-6 years from now? How should I make sure that I retain access to today's data 20 years from now? Is storing things locally even a reasonable option for most people? I have a lot of floppies and old IDE disks from the 90s around here, but no means to access them, and some of the CDs and DVDs has gone bad as well.
But it makes me wonder: Whom do you trust with your data? And who really owns it? What about in 3-6 years from now? How should I make sure that I retain access to today's data 20 years from now? Is storing things locally even a reasonable option for most people? I have a lot of floppies and old IDE disks from the 90s around here, but no means to access them, and some of the CDs and DVDs has gone bad as well.
On both counts.
Nobody else has any significant vested interest in preserving my data - at best any business will have to pay me a penalty if they lose it - almost certainly a pittance compared to the personal value of the data, and a tradeoff they will almost certainly make without hesitation if it makes sound business sense. And should they go out of business, well heaven help my data, they certainly won't - the corporation is already sunk, and it's not like any of the individuals have anything to lose. Non-incorporated businesses may have more favorable (to me) liability repercussions, but are also far more vulnerable to disruption and/or collapse due to personal tragedy
As for ownership - as the old truism states, possession is 9/10ths of the law. If I want to retain ownership of data on someone else's hardware I encrypt it securely before I give it to them. Anything less is an invitation to data-mining, at the least.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Hard disks get bigger.
Store your data on a reliable raid or mirrored array.
Feed it every 1-2 years with fresh, bigger hard disks.
You will never run out of space if you are a normal household.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.