Technically Easy

Tag: Cloud Storage

  • Cloud Storage Providers in Race to Make Their Products PRISM-proof

    Cloud Storage Providers in Race to Make Their Products PRISM-proof

    Although its finer details were only uncovered earlier this year, anxiety over a surveillance program initiated by the National Security Agency (NSA) has grown significantly among companies who rely on having a significant online presence. PRISM, which was a key arm of an anti-terror operation run by former President George W. Bush back in 2007, was designed to collect data covertly.

    Initially, organisations suspected to have links to terrorist organisations were among those targeted by PRISM, although its scope rather controversially spread to companies large and small. Those with files stored online were most likely to fear for the safety and security of their documents, as they could have been seen by NSA employees, leaving them to wonder what steps to take next.

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  • Top 4 Cloud Storage Providers

    Top 4 Cloud Storage Providers

    Anyone who is willing to protect their files, as well as, data from any type of computer hardware or software crash really needs to sign up with a cloud storage provider. This is mainly because of the fact that with a small amount of files, one can get an absolute backup of each and every file they want.

    In the following post you will get to know about the top 4 cloud storage providers for you to go with:

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  • 2 Essential Tips To Keep Your Data Safe and Secure

    2 Essential Tips To Keep Your Data Safe and Secure

    As we all know, computers and computer hardware aren’t built to last. We are constantly replacing computers every five or so years, or replacing hard drives on a regular basis. Hard drives are notorious for going bad, and when that happens, you could potentially lose all your files. We all have files that we can’t lose, whether those files are photos, videos, or business/school-related files, we need to keep such files safe and secure.

    The good news is that, if you haven’t already thought about protecting your files, it isn’t really difficult to protect your important files. This post outlines two tips that you should employ to safely, and easily, backup your important data files so you won’t lose them, as well as protect those files from unauthorized users.

    1. Backing Up Data Offsite

    One aspect of data backup that many people don’t give much thought about is where are they storing their data. Most people would probably copy their files to an external hard drive that is located next to their computer. While this is effective at restoring data that may have been lost on an internal hard drive, it shouldn’t be the only place to backup data.

    Let’s think about this for a second. What would happen if the location that stores both the computer and the external hard drive was struck by a disaster – fire, hurricane, tornado, etc? Such events put the data on both the computer and the external hard drive at risk of being lost.

    In order to prevent such a problem, it is always best to store at least one copy of all your files at another location – offsite. The good news is that storing your files offsite doesn’t have to be complicated.

    For me, I use two methods of storing my files offsite. The first is by backing up my files using Backblaze, which is a cloud service, so my files are backed up – securely, of course – online. I use Backblaze because they offer unlimited storage for a small monthly fee, and I don’t have issues with capping.

    Please note:

    I am affiliated with BackBlaze, but I only recommend them because I am currently using their service and trust them for my data backups.

    A second option that I use is by copying my data to a small, external hard drive, and then physically store that hard drive at another location. Every so often I would bring the hard drive home and update the files on the drive and return it to the offsite location.

    If I were to ever lose all my files, I would restore the data with the small, external hard drive first, and any files that weren’t backed up would be restored from Backblaze. Optionally, I can restore all my files using Backblaze as they can provide a hard drive or USB flash drive of all my files, for a price.

    Encrypt Data

    2. Data Encryption

    While backing up my data to external hard drives is a good option, there is a problem with it – it isn’t secure. While most of us may not think about securing our data to prevent others from reading the files, if you store personal information (think taxes), you may want to look at encrypting your data.

    Encrypting an external hard drive isn’t expensive, and isn’t too difficult. There is a great free, open-source, solution called TrueCrypt that you can download and use to secure the data on any external hard drive.

    For those that aren’t familiar with using TrueCrypt on an external hard drive, you can find tutorials on encrypting your hard drive online by simply doing a search. I found a great tutorial for encrypting my external hard drive that made it very easy to protect my files.

    There are a few things that you will need to keep in mind when using TrueCrypt:

    • Depending on how much data you are encrypting, it could take some time to encrypt your files. It took about 30 hours to encrypt 400 GB of data on my external hard drive. If the process is interrupted, it could make your data unreadable. TrueCrypt does allow you to pause the encryption process, if needed.
    • When you connect your encrypted drive to your computer, you won’t see any data on your drive – this is normal. You will need to use TrueCrypt to mount the drive to the correct letter and then enter a password to decrypt the information on the drive.

    To elaborate on the second point, the drive letters caused me a bit of an issue. When I backup my data through Backblaze, the software looks for drive “I” to backup the data. When I encrypted the drive, and then connected the drive to the computer, Windows automatically connected the drive to “I”. The problem was, Windows couldn’t see the data on drive I because it is encrypted.

    The solution was to remap the external hard drive to another letter – “R”, in my case – and then mount the encrypted drive in TrueCrypt to drive “I”. I now see two drives in Windows – “R” from Windows, and “I” from TrueCrypt.

    For those that are wondering, Backblaze works without any issues with my encrypted external hard drive because it can read/write drive “I” without any problems.

    As for my files I store with Backblaze? Those are encrypted on my system before they are uploaded to their servers, where they remain encrypted, so I have no worries there.

    Above are two essential tips for keeping your data files safe and secure. If you think about all the files that you have currently stored on your hard drive, and what it would take to replace those files, you may want to seriously take a look at backing up those files.

  • What Moving to the Cloud Means for Your Operations

    What Moving to the Cloud Means for Your Operations

    One of the big buzzwords in recent years has been the ‘cloud’ and how much of a game-changer it has been for businesses – but do you know what it means?

    The world of technology is so fast-moving and often complex that it is sometimes easier just to accept an innovation without really thinking about how it changes things. As you would expect, you are better off knowing how such applications are changing, particularly since a move to the cloud tends to bring with it a number of benefits.

    Firms rely on a variety of software to organize their operations and where previously they might have bought a custom-built product or an off-the-shelf option and that was that; now many system providers have moved to a cloud-based software-as-a-service model.

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  • Is Cloud Data Easier to Recover: 5 Cloud Data Recovery Concerns

    Is Cloud Data Easier to Recover: 5 Cloud Data Recovery Concerns

    Long before the cloud came around, individuals and companies alike were turning to Web based storage and data recovery. With a mix of software and Web based management controls, off-site data backup and recovery was finicky, non-mobile and not too much more cost effective than the on-site tradition.

    Now that the cloud is above, the nomenclature of the past no longer applies – cloud storage and cloud data recovery solutions are growing in maturity, offering capabilities in integration, management and control that the old Web based data storage providers just couldn’t offer.

    Regardless of the sky-high appeal of cloud storage benefits, it is not wise to turn to cloud driven business continuity haphazardly. While the perceived ease and cost performance of cloud storage and recovery is tempting, cloud storage and backup present considerable challenges.

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  • How Your Business Can Benefit From Cloud Storage

    How Your Business Can Benefit From Cloud Storage

    Cloud storage has gotten a lot of press in recent times. So, what is it and how can it benefit your company?

    Essentially, Cloud allows you to store and access your data online via a virtual server. This means you don’t have to worry about the fragmentation of data across a number of machines. Placing this data in the Cloud means it is available in one place to all machines with access. This of course, makes for a range of benefits and allows you to adapt and improve your business’s storage solutions without making any sacrifices or having any security concerns.

    Cloud storage can be used for a variety of purposes, including as a backup disk, working disk, for extra storage, as a shared disk or for web and email use.

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  • Do You Backup or Store Your Data?

    Do You Backup or Store Your Data?

    With Google’s announcement introducing Google Drive, I have been thinking more about how I store my data. When it comes to storing data, it seems the cloud is becoming a more popular choice, especially for those that wish to share their files.

    When I view the data storage options on the cloud I am always wondering how I can use such a service for saving all of my data files. I then came to realization that services such as Dropbox and Google Drive aren’t what I need when it comes to backing up my data. There are two ways to look at how you save your data.

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