How secure is cloud backup to the public cloud?

Giulio Alighieri: "All documentsin the public cloud are analyzed in depth."

Many private users are increasingly using online services such as OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. These services make it possible to store data online and then edit or access it from other access points. Access is via a web browser (Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox), proprietary client applications or apps.

Langmeier Backup also supports cloud backup to these online services. However, these online backup services do not replace local data backup, but are only possible as a supplement to local data backup. If you store your data via cloud backup on the Internet, you must ensure that there is always a local copy. However, such data backups are only intended for courageous private users and are certainly not recommended for companies. Online backup services such as OwnCloud are recommended for companies. OwnCloud is a secure alternative to public cloud services such as Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), Dropbox and Google Drive. Instead of entrusting your own data to external providers, OwnCloud allows you to set up a private server that acts as cloud storage and can be accessed from anywhere. For security reasons, the server can encrypt the files after uploading so that they can only be viewed or edited using your own password.

Using cloud storage as an online backup storage space is dangerous

Cloud data protection: Backing up data to online services such as Google Drive is dangerous. The latest findings show the following: Anyone who stores documents and files on Google Drive may no longer be able to access these files later if they are blocked by Google due to "violation of the Google terms of use". In principle, this can happen with any document, and to date there is no way for users to access such blocked documents again.

Giulio Alighieri, a Swiss data protection consultant, says:"I see this as another weighty disadvantage for the use of the public cloud. Firstly, it shows how deeply all our uploaded documents are analyzed by Google. And secondly, users can never be sure which documents Google will block. It is quite possible that Google will also block all strongly encrypted files in the future - their content cannot be analyzed and thus violates the terms of use."

A similar case can be found here. The exact error text when accessing the file in Google Drive and Google Docs reads: "You can't access this content because it violates our Terms of Service. You can find more information on this topic in the Google Drive help."

Only for brave private users: Back up data to the public cloud with Langmeier Backup

For this reason, we only recommend cloud backup to such online services for courageous private users, but this should never be considered for business purposes. If you still dare, you can set up the data backup with Langmeier Backup as follows:

Simply use the Google/One-Drive or Dropbox folder as the backup destination. These then ensure a transfer to the cloud.

The job then looks like this:

As soon as the file has been synchronized with the backup folder in the cloud, a green checkmark appears in front of the file name in Windows Explorer.