Online back up & software

S0litaire

matthew_richard_harman wrote: »

In case anyone else is interested livedrive responded to my email (just over 48hrs later).
"Thank you for contacting Livedrive Support.

The data that is stored within our data centre is encrypted with AES-256 US military grade encryption"

Certainly sounds impressive.

But who holds the keys?

"AES-256 US military grade encryption" sounds impressive till you realise that they may also hold a copy of the decryption keys, so it's as safe as no encryption!

Also is your data individually encrypted (good) or is it the drives it's stored on encrypted (not so good).

That's why I use SpiderOak. They don't have a copy of my encryption key, as all the data is encrypted on my machine before sending to their servers. They have no way of knowing what i'm storing and can't access it.

Lemon_Labs

256 AES SSL is standard pretty much and they do probably hold the keys. Your connection is only encrypted when you connect to your account so when you download/upload files it will be encrypted. I don't find them holding the encryption keys a massive threat because I've nothing to hide.

Lemon_Labs

matthew_richard_harman wrote: »

Thanks for the links, So the data on these sites is very secure. But then it adds another variable to the mix :-) It looks like the data is stored in the US which I guess would be subject to their laws rather than ours (Guess that's something else for me to look at!)

I can underderstand that PC World has a lot of cutomers that aren't interested in the detail.

As I've seen it's livedrive who provide the solution to PC world I've sent an email to them asking them to explain their server security levels. Guess it'll be a good test of their Customer Service!

I see what people mean about the throttling on Carbonite. It looks like it drops to 100Kbps max speed after 200GB of data If my maths is right then the maximum data I'll get up is 1GB per day!

Servers are actually based in London Docklands.

matthew_richard_harman

Lemon_Labs wrote: »

256 AES SSL is standard pretty much and they do probably hold the keys. Your connection is only encrypted when you connect to your account so when you download/upload files it will be encrypted. I don't find them holding the encryption keys a massive threat because I've nothing to hide.

I tend to agree, my concern was more with the situation of a general system admin bod just browsing through my data because he was bored (I know a fairly small chance in reality!). If they need to go to the effort of using a decrypt to see what's in a file then that's ok as I would hope they had a very valid reason!

Lemon_Labs

If you're a little paranoid just upload encrypted zip files via 7zip. That software is free and has 256 AES encryption. Might be a good option.

financialbliss

Just thought I'd mention that after reading through this thread, plus doing a bit of online research myself, I signed up for SpiderOak yesterday.

If anyone is interested, my refer-a-friend link is this:

https://spideroak.com/download/referral/35d0ffe024b152e2bfc20a38179c4e68

which will add an extra 1Gb to your standard 2Gb free account. If you also use promotion code 'hurricanesafe' without the quotes, your standard 2Gb account will be upgraded to 5Gb, then the 1Gb refer-a-friend will be added, giving an initial online storage space of 6Gb.

Note: Promo code used 29/10/2011 successfully - may expire / be withdrawn at some point.