Cloud Storage

Part of protecting your data means ensuring that it is available when you need it. Having a secure back-up of your important files is essential.

There are a large number of cloud storage providers, offering different services, storage volumes, and prices depending on your specific needs.  For individual / personal use a few gigabytes of cloud storage space is usually enough to store your sensitive files and protect them from loss. Below are a few cloud storage providers that offer those few gigabytes of storage space for free.

• Amazon Cloud - 5GB free; free unlimited photo storage with Amazon Prime
• Apple iCloud Drive -  5GB of free cloud storage
• Box - 10GB of free cloud storage
• Drop Box - 2GB of free cloud storage
• Google Drive - 15GB of free cloud storage
• Mega - 50GB of free cloud storage
• Microsoft OneDrive - 5GB free storage
• pCloud - 20GB of free cloud storage
• Sync - 5GB free cloud storage
• Syncplicity - 10 GB of free cloud storage
• Yandex Disk - 10GB free cloud storage

Regardless of which cloud storage provider you choose, to ensure security of your data it is absolutely essential that you encrypt your data BEFORE you upload it to the cloud.

There are various ways to encrypt your data prior to uploading it. I like to create a VeraCrypt container with the data I want to save, and then upload that encrypted container to the cloud. This works especially well with Dropbox because Dropbox can synchronize only the changed portions of large files, while Google Drive and Microsoft One Drive can only synchronize entire files (as far as I can tell). This means that, if you have a 2GB VeraCrypt drive and change a small file in it, Dropbox will upload a small portion of the VeraCryptfile, while Google Drive and Microsoft One Drive  will re-upload the entire 2GB file.  You can also create compressed and encrypted archives using programs like 7Zip or Encryption Wizard and then upload the archive to the cloud.

This being said, it is often better to upload several smaller files to the cloud, rather than one large file.

Using programs like Boxcryptor, Encrypto, and Odrive you can automate the encryption of files you are uploading to your cloud storage site. Of these options, I like Boxcryptor, but both Encrypto and Odrive also seem to work well.

When choosing a method of encryption it is also important to consider its future availability. Any program that you maintain and run locally on your computer can be available to you at any time in the future simply by storing a copy of the program. The same can be said of the cloud storage service itself - will the company still be in business and providing cloud storage in five years? Ten years?

So, yes make use of free (and paid) cloud storage to back-up and protect your data, but remember the first rule of cloud storage: Encrypt BEFORE You Upload to the Cloud!