Are Online Backup Solutions Safe?

Online backup services seem like a great idea. You get to upload your sensitive, personal information to a third-party, depending on them to keep it safe from prying eyes and disasters both minuscule and massive. When you need a recovery you email the service, or log on with some sort of credentials that are known by you and stored on the host server, and then proceed to bring your data back to you on your side of the cloud. It sound's pretty easy, doesn't it? Ease, however, isn't always equal to the intended results. I don't feel when it really counts that online data backup services are a viable alternative to tried and true physical storage.

The problems are many and varied-and all of them put you into a position of paying for the 'idea' of having a backup rather than actually having one. You are depending on a service that accepts payment to hold your data-what if someone offered an employee of the service more money to see what it was you had stored there? It may sound unbelievable, but it's a perfectly plausible and nearly untraceable scenario. You also must keep in mind that while the data services trumpet their awesome encryption algorithms that keep your data safe, that have "Never been broken" as Google gets a subpoena your saved data or stored search history is fair game. That errant search, or inadvertently saved temp file could cause you years of legal problems-or worse if the company can't produce the information being subpoenaed.

For these reasons I have to advocate for local control. If I back up my data on site, it is cheap, it has no recurring costs, and I have just as much of a guarantee of its safety as can be provided by an online service, if not more, because I retain all physical control to the point of willfully destroying it if I want to. A terabyte hard drive can be had for 150.00 US right now, and a backup solution is a one time cost as well. Why pay another service 5.00, 10.00, 20.00 a month to do something that you can automate from your desktop or server? You are just throwing away money in the hope that the guarantee that the service provides you is actually able to be tested when you really REALLY need it, and that is not a risk I'm willing to take for my clients.