Posted on 10/08/2020 2:25:21 PM PDT by Albion Wilde
What cloud services are safe for conservatives from hacking or other mischief? What are best practices and tips for a modestly skilled mac user with no background in programming? (Need replies in ordinary everyday English, as I do not speak Geek.) Grateful for some awesome freeper tutelage. Thanks in advance.
If you have anything personal and sensitive, don't use it. Use a self encrypting SSD or thumbdrive. Samsung T7 external SSD with thumbprint recognition is a great and affordable choice:
None.
Use a thumb drive for all your files. They are small, portable and you just unplug them and your files are unhackable.
I don’t use cloud services except for immediate transfers of unimportant files between devices. The rest of the time, I have two 4TB external hard drives that I use, one of which is a back up of the other.
Take a look at the RavPower mini external SSD.
Compatible with Apple, PC, Android phones, encryption available by user, comes in 512 gb and 1tb, about $80 & $160 respectively. Cables included. Very satisfied with mine.
The only clouds that I trust & use are those that happen on an otherwise sunny hot day when the wife & I are bass fishing... Since she is 81 I don’t want the sun getting her skin all wrinkly, old looking, or cancerous...
Exactly. What the heck is wrong with having external hard drives to auto backup daily? Have a few and swap them once a week. Store in a cool dry place .
I just got a FOUR TERABYTE Toshiba external drive from NewEgg for a hunnert bucks. If you have a USB 3.1 port or USB type C port, this thing is lightning fast.
By yourself an NAS box and store your files theres. Raid 1 configured preferably.
Precisely. Hard drives are cheap these days. Do a little research on hard drive speeds v/s giga bytes of storage and go for it.
What are you looking to do?
When you get a warning, someone wants to sell you something.
The major problem with that is if you have a fire or other disaster you will lose all your information. That happened to a friend of mine. He was very conscientious about backing up but when the house burned down so did his backups. He lost all the records for his business.
LOLs!
I never gave it much thought when I got my last computer and the cloud was offered X-amount free, so I mainly have family photos and conversations about our pets or other dumb stuff. But when that computer broke, I realized I should have backed up more. I like the suggestions above to get an external drive!
I trust cloud things about as far as a could throw them. The only person I trust with my data is me. Nobody cares more about my data than me.
But, ya gotta have backups. Here’s what I do: I have three solid state drives (SSDs). One for a daily backup, one for a weekly backup and one for imaging (cloning) the c: drive where Windows resides.
I also have a drive dock that connects via esata, sort of like usb.
When I backup, the software I use is xcopy, an old, but perfectly usable program that’s been around for years. xcopy has the advantage, via switches, of backing up only new and changed files.
On a daily basis, I plug the daily backup SSD into the drive dock and back up everything but the c: drive. (FWIW, I have C, D, E, F, G, H, and T drives, but that’s a different story.)
On a weekly basis, I plug the weekly backup SSD into the drive dock and back up everything but the c: drive.
Also on a weekly basis, I plug the c: clone SSD into the drive dock and use Macrium Reflect, a free Windows program, to image (clone) the c: drive where Windows resides.
I have modified the system BIOS to look at the drive dock and if something bootable is there, to boot from that. Right after Macrium finishes the clone, I boot from the SSD clone in the drive dock just to make sure it has integrity.
The big disadvantage to this system comes if you have a file that changes frequently. This backup system preserves only the latest copy. If you need to go back two weeks you’re out of luck. Fortunately, I have no files like that.
The three SSDs are stored in my truck; plenty of safety for me. If I lived in town I’d consider storing the SSDs in a safe deposit box at the bank.
Feel free to post questions or comments about this system here or FReep mail me.
“...the house burned down so did his backups...”
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Yeah, like, true, if your house burns down with regularity.
a 1/billion chance of that...
...and the least of your worries if it does.
I should hope my life of gardening and reading fr is not of particular interest to the gubmit; but its just the idea that anyone could poke around in your data or dox your friends because they are conservative that worries me. When I was working, our office was like a user groupeach of us had some area of user knowledge to share to help each other stay up on constant digital developments. But now in retirement, and the shutdown on top of it, its harder to keep up with the learning curve. Im grateful for my fr family!
Thank you for that link re computer security. However, what is a VM?
VM = Virtual Machine. I misunderstood your original question and though you were asking for Cloud Hosting advice.
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