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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.
Once you give your data to "the cloud" it ceases to be YOUR data.
Now it belongs to whomever owns those servers.
You want to keep it? Then keep it on your own hardware.
So I just remember everything.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
oh, and pay taxes on it.
on servers in the balkans and eastern Europe.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Wrong question, if it's asking for a storage company that you can trust your data with.
Correct question: which open source encryption software would you trust to encrypt your data /before/ uploading it anywhere. You can upload whereever you want, and redundantly too. All you have to do is store locally is a private key. No different from storing a passport or home or auto title.
Even the most technically astute among us have lost data to storage format changes over time...
I've moved a lot of stuff forward to modern hard drives, but I'm sure there are some things I missed.
Basically there is no hope, so save what you can, and learn to live with loss.
Really network storage is the best kind of offsite backup but there you simply are going to have to live with the fact that MULTIPLE foreign intelligence agencies will have your data (not just the NSA). Encrypt it to reduce casual prying also from network admins, but just understand everything put on the internet will be seen by someone else.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Know who you can trust?
You, and encryption you implemented ... absolutely nobody else. Period.
And, really, if they break into whatever keeps your private key for your crypto, you can't even trust that.
In an age where spy agencies have decreed they're allowed to do anything, and don't care about jurisdiction ... assume the world is full of malicious actors.
Because it is.
If you're an acquisition by a US company away from having your data be under their jurisdiction, assume they'll get into it even if that involves breaking your country's law.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I trust anyone, including iCloud, but then all my data uploaded to a *cloud*, outside of music files, is GPG encrypted with a 4096 key, and that includes the Truecrypt containers I upload and store in the cloud as well, GPG encryption with a large key and super long pass is safe enough for the foreseeable future, at least the next 20 years I hope, and by then I won't care.
Disclaimer - I do keep local copies as well, redundancy is important as who knows when a *cloud* service will go tits-up as they like to say at El Reg...
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
To whom do you entrust your data?
With whom do you trust your data?
Illiterate moron.
If you really want to be able to keep your data that long, you need a serious plan. You need to back up everything to at least two separate devices other than your main storage, and you need to keep at least one of those devices off-site so your data can't be destroyed in a local disaster. You need to test your backups regularly to know if/when your medium is failing.
When a medium fails- or if you think it might be about to fail- get a replacement that uses more modern technology, and make a fresh copy. If you are ever about to replace your computer with a new one that can't read your old backup medium, buy newer media that does work with the new computer and make copies while you can still read the old ones. If you keep doing that regularly, you can always have a good copy that will work with your computer. It's more effort than copying to the cloud and trusting, but it means you're in control of your own data.
The real key is to keep making regular backups and regular tests. If you expect to be able to put something into a box and still use it 20 years later, you're in for an unpleasant surprise. You have to keep copying, testing, and updating your technology in order to have a serious hope of keeping up. If you do that, though, you have a very good chance of keeping access to your data at least as long as you have software that will still read it. I have 20+ year old data at work that I can still access because we've been careful about moving it to new media, and because the company that wrote the software is good about backward compatibility.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
How should I make sure that I retain access to today's data 20 years from now?
I still have my long-term MSDOS backups from 1991. The backup file is a whopping 13MB in size, and that includes the OS, a word processor, a C compiler and my source code.
.
I just made sure that I continually copied forward the backup files I wanted to retain. Each iteration of archival storage increased about ten-fold, so space wasn't a problem.
I think it is more important to have a good archival process in place. To the OP, the error you made was leaving all the data you want on old floppies and IDE drives, etc.. You should have moved that data off to more current media as your processing moved to more current media.
Things nobody has mentioned here for those not using cloud services are losses due to 'acts of God' for want of a better description. In short if you have RAID on your home NAS you're still at risks from fire or floods or even tornadoes. Fire proof safe not much good if it's been torn into the air and basically lost. It's always a good idea to have a remote backup solution be that a host you pay or a trusted friend. I always think it's a good idea to collaborate. You mind your friends data and they mind yours. You both have a vested interest in safeguarding each other's data. Encryption still good of course but geography and mother earth are foolish to ignore.
As many have said, this is a non-problem if you use encryption. A more actual problem is: who do you choose to give your METAdata? If you have Dropbox permanently running on your pc, encrypted or not, they get to know when you are logged on your PC and where you are. Similarly for your mail provider and your instant messaging/VOIP provider. Hell, your NTP server of choice could probably log your location by geolocating your IP address and fingerprinting your NTP request.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault