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LuminousFX

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 25, 2014
49
65
Have any of you guys used these cloud services purely as a backup?

I'm aware that Dropbox is more like a Virtual/Online USB flash drive. I have read that symlink can be created and pointed to my photos to have it uploaded onto Dropbox. But I have this naggy feeling that if my Dropbox account was hacked, or there was a massive security breach, someone can delete the files on my Dropbox account and it'll disappear on my computer too.

I was wondering if there are ways to circumvent this? Or what's the ideal way to use Dropbox as a backup solution?
 

rctlr

macrumors 6502a
May 9, 2012
738
175
If you want to use dropbox to back up your data, and you are worried about compromise, then use boxcryptor.

Another alternative is spider oak, an online backup system (5GB), thats encrypted on their servers. They have no access to your stuff there.
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,373
43,265
That's the risk of using cloud services, if the system was hacked you may lose your data when it tries to sync.

I was under the impression that dropbox like the others already encrypt the data on their servers.
 

LuminousFX

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 25, 2014
49
65
But encryption only goes so far.

I was thinking of having a separation partition where the Dropbox/Google Drive folder reside and have a 1 way sync set up to replicate my files into those cloud services folder. That way, if my account was compromised, I have my files safe on my local drive. But I'm not sure if this is a good idea or I'm wasting too many computing resources to do such tasks.
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,373
43,265
It seems like you're over-analyzing things. Why not just grab a portable hard drive, and run Carbon Copy Cloner. Then take that drive off site.

As for cloud drive services, if your account was compromised, they'd only have access to your data on the cloud, which if they removed it, would cause it to be removed on your computer(s) once they synced. I don't think segregating the dropbox folder to a different drive really buys you any more security.

As a matter of policy, I don't store anything that is sensitive on OneDrive (I use this instead of dropbox). It holds much of my documents but nothing that contains my personal information.
 
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