Roger Williams wrote: > ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area. > ** If you did, we all thank you. > > > >>>>>> Kevin Phillips <kevin at kpitconsulting.com> writes: >>>>>> > > > How is the privacy of your files using these services ? > > Frankly, weak. I know of no backup service providers who provide a guarantee > that stored data will not be accessible by its employees nor that the results > of such employee access not be released upon request to courts or interested > law enforcement organisations. Most providers specifically spell out such > exceptions in their TOS. > > Moreover, all of the popular online backup services rely on encryption in the > link (SSL) and cloud (AES usually), rather than encryption with your own key > in the client before it's uploaded. This means that the data is unencrypted > some of the time on their servers. > > So... you shouldn't use one of the consumer-oriented services if you're a > Chinese dissident because it's presumptively insecure against your risks. > > More to the point: given the current environment and the likelihood of ACTA > (which as of March includes a provision to require ISPs to provide information > about suspected copyright infringers without a warrant) or similar > legislation, I would be very careful about borrowed or ripped media. > I rip DVDs that I own for playback convenience and protection of the original > media (I have kids), but I won't backup these files up to an online service. > > For my business, we've been relying on the traditional model of local backup > to tape (from a local server, which provides primary backup for individual > computers) with off-site tape storage. We may replace the tapes with cloud- > based storage -- but in this case, the locally-stored backups are already > encrypted with our own keys before we upload them. Just off hand, if you are using either Linux or Mac OS X, you can use Amanda <http://amanda.zmanda.com/> for backups and configure it to connect to Amazon S3. You can also configure it to encrypt your data before sending it. Documentation is on their wiki. -- --------------- Chris Hoogendyk - O__ ---- Systems Administrator c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center ~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst <hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu> --------------- Erdös 4