Secure Online Storage

Are there any secure online storage that would be safe and secure enough to be used as an additional backup for extremely important personal records?

Does online storage like Dropbox, Skydrive, iCloud, etc. provide enough security to be used as an alternate for important personal records?

I scan and try to maintain digital records of all personal records with multiple backups but wonder if online storage is secure enough for an additional backup.

[quote=“tango42”]Are there any secure online storage that would be safe and secure enough to be used as an additional backup for extremely important personal records?

Does online storage like Dropbox, Skydrive, iCloud, etc. provide enough security to be used as an alternate for important personal records?
[/quote]

Hi Tango. First off, let me say that I know nothing about Dropbox, Skydrive, iCloud and other online storage services. However, I know a few ways to encrypt data in a really secure manner. Whether or not my methods will work for you depends on a couple of things, mainly:

  1. Which operating system do you use?
  2. Can you work comfortably at the command line (as opposed to point-and-click)?

If you can work at the command line and you use either Linux or Windows, you can use “bcrypt” to encrypt data. It’s very secure. You can read about it and download it for Windows here:

bcrypt.sourceforge.net/

If you’re a Linux user, you could install it directly. For example, Ubuntu users will find a bcrypt package in the Ubuntu repositories. This is preferable to downloading source code from SourceForge and having to compile it.

It seems that bcrypt is available for Mac OSX:

mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/bcrypt.shtml

If you use an iPad, I have no idea if bcrypt is available for it.

Simple explanation on how to use bcrypt:

linuxandfriends.com/2011/07/22/b … tion-tool/

Although bcrypt is very secure, it’s claimed that “scrypt” is even more secure. But so far as I know, it’s only available on Linux. You can read about that here:

tarsnap.com/scrypt.html

But both bcrypt and scrypt are command line tools, so if that’s a non-starter for you, you’ll have to find another solution.

Once encrypted with bcrypt or scrypt, the files are pretty much impenetrable. You can upload them to any online storage site with a great deal of confidence. Don’t forget your password, or you’re screwed.

Good luck.
DB

An old thread, but I thought you’d be interested. Check out Tresorit.