Cloud storage as cloud backup:
four safety rules.
Hi, everyone, I'm Leo Notenboom for askleo.com.
If you're watching this on YouTube,
be sure to hit the subscribe button down below so that you can get access to all
of the videos I release throughout the week.
At the end of the video, if you find it helpful, hit that thumbs up button.
Those two actions, the subscribe and the thumbs up really do
help people find what they're looking for when they're searching the world.
Number two, search engine, YouTube.
So cloud services, cloud storage, cloud, backup, cloud, everything.
It's really confusing.
It's really cool.
But you do need to use it safely.
Let's read the question and then we'll get into it.
I now have one terabyte of Microsoft, OneDrive storage.
How should that affect my backup strategy?
Most of my data files are now on OneDrive.
Do those need to be backed up?
Can I use OneDrive space as my external hard drive for backups of my other files?
How about for image backups?
Can or should Macrium Reflect put a system
image into OneDrive other advice re: wise and safe use of cloud storage?
The term cloud has been thrown about a lot.
It frustrates a lot of people like me because ultimately it's a marketing term.
It really is.
Cloud storage is something that we've all
been using probably for a couple of decades right now.
If you've been sending email for 20 years, you're already using a cloud service
and your email has been stored on servers online and the quote unquote cloud.
Don't let the term concern you.
It really is, as somebody once put it, using somebody else's computer.
In this case, somebody else's computer is
Microsoft or Googles or whoever's in a data center somewhere else
on the planet as opposed to another computer in your room.
But it really is just putting data on somebody else's computer.
So how do you do that safely? Well, first,
I do want to clarify the difference between cloud storage and cloud backup.
Cloud storage is, I guess I'd call it, more or less equivalent to an external
hard drive in the sense that it's another place to put data.
There's no structure imposed.
It's just whatever data you want to put
in a cloud, you can OneDrive and Dropbox and Google Docs and any number of other
cloud storage providers can be used for this.
It's a great way to store things, to share things,
to to make things accessible to other people on the Internet.
But really, there's no rules other than
perhaps, you know, specific file size limitations and acceptable use policies.
Of course. Cloud backup, on the other hand, is a specific use of cloud storage.
It is intentionally using that online storage as part of.
And I want to stress part of your overall backup strategy.
And it's that part of that I really want
to focus in on, because cloud storage is in and of itself, not backup.
And it's not a complete backup solution.
There's more to it than that.
So four steps.
Number one, backup your cloud data.
This one gets a lot of people confused and concerned
just because you put something in, say, OneDrive, if that's the only place it is,
if it's in OneDrive and nowhere else, it's not backed up.
Yes, I get it.
Microsoft, I'm sure backs up.
The OneDrive servers.
Yes, I get it.
That file may be replicated in one drive folders across multiple machines,
but it's still only one place.
And here's why.
If you.
Delete that file in one drive, it's gone from everywhere,
more to the point, if your Microsoft account gets hacked
and the hacker deletes the file from your one drive.
The file is gone.
You don't have a backup copy, one drive is conceptually at least one
place, and if it's in only one place, it's not backed up.
That means one of the most important
things you can realize is that cloud services are not by themselves a backup.
You cannot rely on their system backups being a way for you to recover files.
For example, if you lose access to the account,
you need to take additional steps to also backup things yourself.
Now, the good news is that this is
actually pretty easy and you may already be doing it.
Like I said,
the fact that you have a file in OneDrive that's replicated also then on several
different machines, as long as you're doing image backups of those machines.
You're making a back up of the contents of your OneDrive folder, in other words,
if the file is on the hard drive of a machine that you're also backing up
using image backups or whatever other technique you want,
that's another place that image backup is another place that will act as a backup.
So the way to think of it is simply if you lose access to your OneDrive account
and all the files and the OneDrive account get deleted and they're deleted
from everywhere you have it, then it's only one place.
If you could recover it from your own
image backup or some other kind of backup you've done, you're good.
You're backing up your cloud data.
But don't let that slip through the cracks.
Backup your cloud data.
No, 2: be careful about what files you put in the cloud and how.
So I've mentioned hacking your Microsoft
account as one way you could lose files. Fine.
But honestly, if somebody gains access
to your Microsoft account, will they have access to your OneDrive
files, they have access to everything you've stored in there.
Do you want them to?
Are there sensitive things there?
Now, there are two solutions to this problem.
One
is don't put anything in cloud storage you wouldn't want a hacker to have access to.
It's that simple, right?
That's a simple solution.
It limits the usefulness of cloud storage. I get it.
You can't put everything up there.
But it's a simple rule to follow.
The other approach is to encrypt what you
put in cloud storage two ways manually using a tool like maybe
7-zip or any of another of a set of encryption utilities or using tools
like BoxCryptor or Cryptomator, which will do it automatically for you.
That's the approach I use.
I use cloud storage to its fullest
potential by actually using it to host my sensitive documents, fully encrypted.
So they're safe and secure so that even if a hacker gains access to them,
they have no idea what these random encrypted documents are all about.
Three: keep backing up locally.
You asked if it would be a good place for your image backups.
The answer is no.
The problem is size.
Your image backups are probably going
to be big, really big, like hundreds of gigabytes big
unless you have an amazingly fast Internet connection.
And probably, you know what?
If you're watching this, you probably don't,
then it's going to take
an immense amount of time to upload a file that large anywhere,
be a cloud storage cloud, no cloud backup, OneDrive, whatever.
In fact, depending on your Internet speed,
it can take more than a day to upload a day's worth of backup,
which means that you could never actually be done right.
It's always uploading something.
And of course, that's also impacting your Internet speed, how you're using your
computer, your ability to use the Internet.
So the short answer is no.
You still want to keep backing up locally,
probably to an external drive, since they're cheap and they're easy
and it's the default that I recommend for so many people.
You can use your online backups,
your OneDrive and your Dropbox and others as part of your backup strategy.
That's one of the reasons I mentioned as part of your backup strategy.
So, for example, in my case, I do both.
I have image backups of my machine happening every night.
I then also have all of my documents
in Dropbox and OneDrive the image backups happen once a night.
The Dropbox makes a copy of my files like every time they change.
So what that means is that these documents
are getting uploaded more or less continuously every time I make a change.
So even if I delete something this
afternoon that I only created in the morning,
I can go to Dropbox and get it, even though it's not in my image backup.
So it's part of.
A strategy that can be used, but you got to keep backing up locally
and number four: I've mentioned hacking a couple of times.
It happens it happens more often than you think.
You must secure your account.
And that's the usual litany of things we talk about so often.
Use long, strong passwords, use a different password for every site.
Consider adding two factor authentication, especially for those services where you're
using cloud storage for anything even remotely sensitive or remotely useful.
Never share those passwords with anybody.
Never log into those accounts on computers that you don't control.
You don't know what's on there.
You don't know that there isn't a keyboard
logger or password sniffer or something else.
Use public Wi-Fi safely. It can be done.
I do it myself, but you need to know how.
And of course, you need to use common
sense to avoid phishing attempts, malware and more.
Like I said, this is the standard litany of ways to keep your accounts safe.
But if you're using online storage, you want to take additional care to make
sure that your account doesn't get compromised, because so many of the issues
that I've just talked about all happen if the account gets compromised.
I hope that was helpful.
I hope that gives you some ideas of what to do with your online storage.
Like I said, I love it. I use it.
I use it as much as I can.
It's very, very convenient.
I have no concerns about my security now
that I've taken the right steps. For the article on which this video was
based, for updates, for related links, for comments and more, visit
askleo.com/16362
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.