Backing up to MS OneDrive

[Karl Auer]

On Thu, 2020-03-05 at 08:40 -0400, J. Paul Bissonnette wrote:
> Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> Your data is WAY less safe on your shelf than with MS
> I guess it would depend on how important the data or how important
> the owner perceives the data to be; or maybe even how paranoid the
> owner is.  

No, not really. By almost any objective metric you care to name, your
data is safer from destruction, loss, theft, etc with Microsoft than
with you. Subjectively, "safe" may have other parameters.

People generally hugely underestimate the likelihood of losing their
data. It can be lost to human error, to malicious damage, to theft, to
natural disaster. Your only defence is to have backups, to have
multiple copies of those backups, and to store those copies separately
- the further apart the better. To prevent against your own stupidity
or a slow disaster like ransomware, you need your backups to be
versioned as well - not just each overwriting the last.

This does not have to be sophisticated. Anyone can have a "versioned"
backup by simply cycling through multiple storage devices rather than
always reusing the same one. Offsite storage can be as simple as taking
the backups in to work and taking the oldest one home,  or having an
arrangement with a friend across town.

You might find this article useful:

https://biplane.com.au/blog/?p=359

The guts of it is that backups should be:

    comprehensive – i.e. you are backing up everything that should be
backed up.

    versioned – you don’t keep just one version, you keep a backup from
today, yesterday, the day before etc etc, back as far as possible.

    frequent – if disaster strikes, you will lose all your work back to
at least the most recent backup. Less than daily for a typical business
is probably insufficient.

    out-of-band (not local, not to shares) – if you back up to any
place that one of your computers can reach, and one of your computers
is compromised, all the backups you have stored there are toast. So
back up to a place your other systems cannot reach.

    off-site – if your office burns down, you really don’t want all
your backups to burn as well. Store them off-site – at home, in a bank
vault, wherever – as long as it is safe and a long way away from the
originals. Different building is good, different town is better,
different continent is best

    preferably automated –  because people make mistakes. They forget
to do the backups, forget to swap the backup disks, don’t notice that a
backup has failed, etc.

To which I would now add "preferably encrpted, so that you do not have
to trust the keepers of your backups."

> If I had any sensitive data to store remotely, it would be on servers
> that are not in any of the Five Eyes or even the 14 Eyes.

Encrypt it and you are pretty much safe from them as well.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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