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.
The major problem with that is if you have a fire or other disaster you will lose all your information.
The thought had occurred to me. Life is so complicated. Better read my house insurance policy again.
Network Attached Storage. I have 2 4 terabyte drives configured as Raid 1 which means that if 1 drive goes down, my other drive still has the data stored. One nice compliment to my setup is I can use my smartphone app to see all my files as well - from anywhere. my Nas box is connected to my router with cat5E so I can see it from any computer and store my files there instead of on my local machine or in the “cloud”. Piece of cake.
Thank you, FRiend upchuck. I’m on mac, so my process would have to be different, but I get what you’re saying about developing a system and routine. I like what you’re suggesting about finding a way to keep the external drives off-site. A poster above was concerned about a house fire, for instance. Around here, theft is also a possibility.
A cogent explanation, Mark; thank you.
As for calling Apple: Apple doesn’t give you advice; they sell you advice. And you have to make an appointment with their “genius bar” to get it! That’s why I’m here with the practical geniuses of FR, to narrow the scope of my ignorance somewhat before spending money on the next step.
I’ve been told to go around your house and video everything and give a copy to your insurance agent. But how do you know he or she will keep it secure, so that the night cleanup person doesn’t have access to a detailed display of your stuff and where you hide Granny’s jewelry? So complicated.
That is.very excellent advice. One thing I want to do in retirement is scan all the deteriorating family photo albums—some of the pix are over 100 years old. Sounds like I’d better do some research on media shelf life.
Thank you, good buddy. How are you two doing with the plandemic, etc,?
if you have to suddenly evacuate your house (highly unlikely),
you should have a mental list of things you should take with you,
and your back up drive should be on that list.
And, once again I say, it is a one in a billion chance.
For you males of the species, perhaps. I’m struggling to understand, being more of an “arts” than “sciences” type of person, and I thank you, TomServo, for having clarified tbose terms and how a paired backup should be done. You, too, Prov1322!
Yes it is...elegant device with no designer markings, easy to slip into a pocket and barely notice its there...and easy to use. With my android phone it’s plug and play, Win & Mac have set up programs for install options, such as encryption.
Enjoying life in a “free state”
My father passed away in mid May and my brother decided to have the service in August. Of course, our state was still on the list requiring a 14 day quarantine. Brother and his circle are all about masks 24/7, so we did not go. He would pass out if he knew just how many large, maskless gatherings we have been to in this plandemic. (As you can imagine, Mrs Prov1322’s sister is apoplectic when she hears about our unlocked-down activities...)
We are headed to another one this weekend!
Trust you are well also!
You better have a backup of that. SSD failure modes are not soft—it will be like flipping a switch, and you will suddenly have no recoverable data. I don’t use SSDs for backups.
Before you do anything else, make sure you deal with the potential loss of the stuff you can't replace.
Get a brick of archival CDs or DVDs. While they haven't been around quite long enough to cite actual use cases, simulated ageing tests point to a storage life of about 100 years. Get a handful of USB thumb drives & copy your important data to these. In both cases there is no guarantee that all the copies will survive in the long term but by having enough duplicates the complete data-set should be recoverable. Blank CDs and thumb drives are cheep, that picture of Elvis is priceless. Take one of the CDs and thumb drives, as well as one of the spare hard drives that you backed up the less important stuff on and store them in a safe-deposit box at your bank. Store a set in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar buried under your porch or in your back yard, give copies to friends across town or across the country. The more you spread the sets around the better chance your information will survive even if your fair city gets wiped out by an asteroid next week.
Once you've gotten the really important stuff out of the way you should use the Father, Son, Grandpa backup strategy. Drive space is practically free. You can get a 1 terabyte refurbished drive for $20 and a 4 terabyte Western Digital Blue for around $100. You want at least double the disk space you are baking up. You also want three drives. Start with the first drive (the Son). Back up your computer and store it somewhere away from the computer, your office, deposit box, etc. Next week make another backup. This drive is now the Son and the old Son is now the "Father". Store this drive off-site. Next time backup on a new drive. The next week, swap out the Father with the Grandfather and use it for the new backup. Keep on rotating the drives and you'll always have a backup off-site and multiple backups to fall back on in case the latest one is lost, stolen or damaged.
Finally, I would say don't be afraid of the Cloud. Unless you are storing the password to your billion dollar Swiss bank account in a file tagged #BillionDollarSwissBankAccountPassword your data is probably more safe than the physical cash sitting in the bank. To paraphrase either William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, if there was a machine that had ALL the data from everybody who lived for the last 100 years it would still have to ACT on all that data so, unless you were some world-class scofflaw you would be, for all practical purposes anonymous.
I’m not a Mac user but it would appear that the Apple’s standard back-up services would be all that you need.
What excellent, comprehensive advice in plain English! Can’t thank you enough. I know I will return to this often in days ahead. Also going to back up this thread by printing it out as well as making a digital copy.
I do understand there is no cloud, but computer banks. I suppose if China or Russia involves us in a hot cyber war, our “clouds” may be the least of our worries. I’m trying to stockpile some prescription meds, for starters. Realizing the errors of my ways here not backing up. Thank you for your advice!
BINGO!!!
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