Best way to store important items on a PC?

geek84

Hi Folks

Could someone please suggest the best way to store important items on the internet or PC?

Items I was thinking of are - birth certificates, passports, school certificates, driving license etc.

A friend of mine did suggest Drop Box, Google Drive, and Sky Drive. Has anyone used any of these before? Are they quite secure?

Thanks

Chimpofdoom

geek84 wrote: »

Hi Folks
A friend of mine did suggest Drop Box, Google Drive, and Sky Drive. Has anyone used any of these before? Are they quite secure?

I use dropbox and google drive, both are quite good, have their advantages.

Dropbox says they are the most secure... but at the end of the day..

Your password will depend on how secure these services are

Plan B would be a USB flash drive with secure encryption software on it, again, password dependent

Stompa

http://www.truecrypt.org/

victor2

I would favour a USB stick with encrypted data on it - a password protected ZIP file will probably be sufficient. Then, more importantly, store the memory stick away from your house, with a relative for example. Should your house be burgled or burn down, that's when you can require such information.
If I were to store data in the cloud, then I would still have a password protected zip file or similar (with a different password!), so that even if it's not foolproof, you'd have an extra layer of protection should somebody or something get the contents of your cloud store.

S0litaire

Personally I don't trust sites like "dropbox" for anything other than sharing things I'd not mind loosing or others getting access to. (they have had security breaches in the past)

I use "spideroak" it's encrypted and you can backup single folders or entire computers. Only the user has the password no one else (no backdoors that may allow others to read your data)

esuhl

I would absolutely not trust any "cloud" based service (like Dropbox) with personal data. Their last security breach (if I remember correctly) meant that anyone's files could be accessed without a password.

Not only that, but the files are stored/passed through the US which has terrible privacy laws... Not that the US government seems to obey such laws anyway, as Snowden revealed.

I'd use TrueCrypt and store the files locally.

captaincool

TBH I can't trust sites like "Google Drive" for sharing my personal data. Normally I would use a hard drive disk. Even a USB stick can do the trick though.

closed

why would you need to store electronic versions at all, nothing cloud based is totally secure, use hard disk and dvd.

Gratis

The cloud whose security I trust most is Wuala.

It's based in Switzerland.

The first 5 GB of storage is free.

Information and a review here.

retiredin2011

What happens if you want to retrieve your files when the internet is down?


My internet goes down if there is a power cut.

Andy_L

What are you hoping to achieve with a scanned copy of the documents?

Most places will want the original copies for verification & if you loose them then replacemnts are avaliable from the issuer eg the DVLA