Hacked accounts make cloud services vulnerable. Back them up if they contain sufficient value to you. Also, encryption options
See also
Reasons to consider backing up a cloud service
Google wipes all your data (easy and cheap "sanitizing"!) before returning your account, in some cases when an account gets compromised:
- http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/law_policy_and_it/who_s_watching_the_store
- This was written by a Cornell staff member.
- ChemIT know of a campus IT peer whose account was similarly compromised and subsequently "sanatized".
Your DropBox.com account gets hacked and all data removed:
- http://www.businessinsider.com/professor-suffers-dropbox-nightmare-2013-9
- College Professor states, "I Lost Tons Of Critical Files Because Of Dropbox"
Or, you do something you didn't intend to do, resulting in loss of data.
Services ChemIT has heard of, or in some cases have personally used
Backing up Google services
There are a number of services which promise to regularly back up your Google docs (Drive), email, calendars, and contacts. We're sure none are panaceas. However, they do seem to represent reasonable protection for restoring a hacked (and subsequently blank-slated!) account. You may also value being able to recover an individual item mistakenly delete. (Seems easy to restore specific docs and emails, for example.)
Oliver personally uses (9/2013) Spanning Backup. Usually costs $40/year, but you can save $5 by using Oliver's discount code if you decide to subscribe:
Full disclosure: If you use Oliver's code, he'll get a $5 referral fee from Spanning Backup. He recommends using their 14-day free trial to test-drive first.
I have a friend who uses CloudPull to back up Google info. Read more about that option:
And here are yet other options ChemIT has heard about. Please share if you have any experience with this, or any other services. Thanks!
Backing up DropBox.com and the like
One easy way to protect your DropBox data is just conduct normal backups of local files, with the ability to restore from specific points in time.
Alternatively, here are some promising, but untested-by-ChemIT, tools and services:
Encrypting files on Google Drive and DropBox
Idea: Any good? Seems to be an (institutional only?) tool to provide employees a secure, professional, easy to encrypt files when using Dropbox (Google Drive, etc).
Q: Scalable //down// to just a Research group, versus a Department or all of Cornell?
- I means scalable in terms of cost, administrative overhead, technology infrastructure and skills, etc.
http://aegeusit.com/aegeus/solutions/secure-the-cloud/
They claim: Use Envault Cloud Protection (ECP) to extend Dropbox by transparently adding the following:
- Encryption where YOU (the employer) control the keys in a fully transparent manner so that your employees do not need to worry about creating and managing passwords
- Audit trail of all documents shared by whom and with whom
- Ability to see if any individuals may be sharing more than they should
- Share and Unshare control
- Ability to switch cloud vendors easily and at will
- Better ease of use and look and feel than native Dropbox
- A per user cost that is a fraction of other solutions such as Box, Egnyte and others.