Comments on: A few points to consider about off-site backups

Some thoughts about an article on off-site backups in The New York Times by David Strom.

[john55440]

"...there is no way to have real security if the same organization is both encrypting your files and storing them...."

Yes, that it kind of "creepy", for lack of a better word.

[Hans Klein]

I don't worry about it any more than I worry about my bank stealing my money. It would be business suicide for a backup company to pry around in their customers' data. If it ever got out (which it would), they would see their business go poof. Most of the good backup companies, like Carbonite and Mozy, will allow you to keep your own encryption key if you are really paranoid. Are they secretly copying your key so that they can peek into your photo collection? Why would they do that?

[RicABlair]

to Hans K. There are some people who might actually store offsite highly critical data like SSN, passwords, personal information, account numbers, etc. A rogue company can view and take down all of the useful information and use just one tidbit at various times spaced out over long periods to minimize being traced. If you have 100 customers and 3 suffer identity theft in a year, there's no necessary link to the storage site (like there would be if 95 of 100 customers in a month were compromised). Why would they do that? It's not always the company, but perhaps a disgruntled employee with access. With the stolen info, filching $1000 from a company bank account here and there over time can supplement an income and go undetected. As Michael has shown us, you can never be too paranoid.

[nreddyk]

Fine print is very important, Carbonite does not backup video files by default. Not even when they are in the folder that you mark for backup. Video files need to individually selected by going into folders and subfolders. But the advertising gives the wrong impression that every file is automatically safe. Also I am not talking about huge files, even the short clips are left out by default even when they reside in the regular My Pictures folder. This is an important issue because the pictures and video clips saved in the same folder by Picasa or other such software..

[dfriend1]

Hi, I'm Carbonite's CEO. Here's the way video files work in Carbonite: If you have a folder full of videos, you can right click on the folder and select "Back up all videos in this folder." You don't have to select each video file separately. The reason we do it this way is because there are high value videos like home movies and clips, and low-value videos, like taped TV shows. If you just back them all up by default, you could be spending weeks of months uploading a bunch of junk videos and meanwhile the important stuff is just waiting in the queue, exposed to possible loss if your hard drive crashes. Usually people only have a few folders with videos in them, so it's not very hard to pick which ones you want to back up.
Regards,
Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
Carbonite Online Backup

[paranoid.one]

This is a great set of points. In terms of the comprehensiveness of backup and protection, ElephantDrive has been by far the best. Unlike Mozy, it is not a "mirroring" service. It actually protects everything - including older versions (if there is a limit, I haven't hit it), and it doesn't have any surprise exemptions like Carbonite (at least not that I've found yet).

That said, like all the others there is something a little disturbing about the EULA (or lack thereof). It certainly wasn't any worse than the rest of the gang and the program does what it is supposed do.