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I haven't put anything on the Cloud, but this is probably a great idea.
...........
Is it?
I consider the Cloud the worst security notion I've seen since the Great Depression. Summing up the issue, one owns something but they don't have it in their hot little hand. So when it really comes down to it, how do they know they own anything?
That may be true but many families have shoeboxes of old photos that end up in the garbage. Instead of keeping piles of bad photos, we have been selecting some of the best and making photo books. We make copies for our kids and sometimes other relatives. I think they will survive for at least a couple of generations.
My partner lost a couple boxes with old yearbooks, photo albums, and other sentimental papers in the Harvey flood. I think it's a lot safer and easier to protect digital media than hard copy. But the two are not mutually exclusive.
I haven't put anything on the Cloud, but this is probably a great idea.
How exactly would I do that? (Is there a way to export everything rapido?)
Sign up for a free Dropbox and/or OneDrive account. Each offers you 5Gb free storage. How much storage do you need for all of your photos? Google and Amazon also offer similar options.
I consider the Cloud the worst security notion I've seen since the Great Depression. Summing up the issue, one owns something but they don't have it in their hot little hand. So when it really comes down to it, how do they know they own anything?
Do you feel the same way about your checking, saving, and retirement accounts? Are you okay with keeping your money as an electronic entry in someone else's computer or do you keep all of your assets under the mattress? If you have $10k in your savings account but you don't have the cash in your hot little hand, how do you know you really have $10k?
Do you feel the same way about your checking, saving, and retirement accounts? Are you okay with keeping your money as an electronic entry in someone else's computer or do you keep all of your assets under the mattress? If you have $10k in your savings account but you don't have the cash in your hot little hand, how do you know you really have $10k?
That may be true but many families have shoeboxes of old photos that end up in the garbage. Instead of keeping piles of bad photos, we have been selecting some of the best and making photo books. We make copies for our kids and sometimes other relatives. I think they will survive for at least a couple of generations.
yes- I went through my moms old photos and some were just so bad. I didn't regret throwing those out.
I have 3 computers - an old one and two newer ones. They all have pictures on them.
I used to use Picasa and loved it - of course it was phased out.
If I were to croak tomorrow (or today), no one would know of the years and years of photos I have stored on my computer. I do have an external drive which I have copied everything to, but I have no idea what to do with the photos - I couldn't possibly print all of them out, but they are all worthy of being printed out. What do people do these days with family photos?
I have a family tree on ancestry. I've scanned many old black and white photos and uploaded them there.
I figure this way at least some relatives distant or those connected through DNA can share them. They won't die.
I also have two private family facebook pages for each side of my family. We connect there and share old photos.
That's what they say but are you really sure? You're ok with keeping all your financial assets that everyone else covets in the banking cloud but worry about your worthless data? No one gives a rat's behind about your digital photos.
I haven't put anything on the Cloud, but this is probably a great idea.
How exactly would I do that? (Is there a way to export everything rapido?)
I have free or paid accounts with iCloud (Apple only), Dropbox, Box, and Amazon S3. I also have a free Flickr account for sharing photos. For stuff you're really concerned about losing, you can store in more than one place. I also have a clone of my laptop on an external drive that I update once a week (as well as a backup of data that automatically backs up to Amazon S3 when I'm on wifi), and a program running that automatically backs up my iPhone.
Regarding security: just don't backup things that could be used for identity theft to the cloud unless you're sure it's encrypted. If you don't know or want to know how to do that, keep such things out of the cloud. Things like photos and videos and music usually aren't in that category for most of us. The cloud is safe if you use good sense in deciding what to upload to it, and use encrypting where appropriate (this makes content unreadable without a key).
Some cloud services appear on your PC as an external drive, like Dropbox and iCloud. The application on my MacBook Pro that backs up to Amazon S3 can be opened and contents accessed via drag and drop. When I open my iCloud or Dropbox "drive", I can just drag and drop whole folders to and from the external storage - or just access them directly on the cloud.
For other sites and applications like Flickr, you can either browse to a folder with files you want to upload or just drag and drop a folder from your PC to the browser. It depends on the site or application.
When I'm on wifi outside my apartment building, I always use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to login - this encrypts your connection and routes you through a server so people can't sniff the data you're transmitting. There are free as well as paid VPNs out there - for a free one, I used to use HotSpot Shield, but now I subscribe to NordVPN because it's more flexible for my purposes:
So that's 17GB of free data storage, and 1TB of free photo/video storage. For storing a lot of data, Amazon S3 has a number of affordable options - that's what I use for most online backups - I only get charged for the actual data I store on S3.
That's what they say but are you really sure? You're ok with keeping all your financial assets that everyone else covets in the banking cloud but worry about your worthless data? No one gives a rat's behind about your digital photos.
Depends on what is on the digital photo, doesn't it? After all, how many of us are photographing our "records" these days?
It is, of course, more than that. None of my manuscripts, be it fiction or academic, would find their place in the Cloud. While the author world may be dying, I certainly would want for no other to make money off my ideas, so I am not going to put it "out there" where I know nothing of its security. After all, how many news reports do we get of our names and ssn's being released?
Let the young ones think that the Cloud is great........but I would think us older ones would at least take a minute to know better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vasily
........Regarding security: just don't backup things that could be used for identity theft to the cloud unless you're sure it's encrypted. If you don't know or want to know how to do that, keep such things out of the cloud. Things like photos and videos and music usually aren't in that category for most of us. ............
But should it be?
Let's take the ranch house for example............and city-data.
Anyone reading city-data will know that I live alone, am a woman, and am armed to the teeth.
GEEE, WOULDN'T TAMARA'S HOUSE BE A GREAT PLACE TO KNOCK OVER?
Hence the reason why I don't post pictures of my house. Now, posting pictures of one's house is not a concern to most people but given all the other data we put out.......should it be?
In one of the dark areas of society that I occasionally operate in, I often hear people provide the defense to doing something outrageous "in public" as okay since anyone who exposed you would be exposing themselves. Well, there are several counter defenses such as being exposed as being the innocent bystander in someone's picture, the exposer may not care about their reputation, they might do it for spite, or one might be exposed as part of someone's investigation ...... which is what I do. I have found so much information on people who are on those sex sites and then I talk to others who think they are safe to post their pictures, even if only dressed, there.
Data mining is quite the reality.
Let's look at another area not so dark. During the Bush II administration, I was a member of the Sierra Club and they wanted to go down to Padre Island to build sand animals as a protest against the drilling to take place. Quite the innocent affair, no?
I could not be a part of it for I know those kind of things draw press attention and I could just picture this happening in an interview for a security job. The interviewer sliding a press picture across the table and saying, "Can you explain this, Ms. Ounce?". Certainly I could for I don't do things that I am not ready to stand up and acknowledge should it appear on the front page of the paper tomorrow but would it cost me that job?
Which is probably the best advise about the Cloud. Post nothing there that you are not ready to have on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow, that you are not ready to accept any damage that might occur because of it.
Last edited by TamaraSavannah; 12-23-2017 at 10:05 AM..
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