Protecting Digital Data

[Gondor]

What is the best way to keep your digital date secure and easily portable? Some people carry software protected USB flash drives some external hard drives.

[wvbreamfisherman]

Encrypted flash drive is what I use, with a very strong password. Probably not NSA-proof, but probably good enough to frustrate most people.

[Theosus]

There's nothing I have that I need to keep secure. My work stuff stays on the servers at work. Personal passwords are in my head. If someone steals my portable hard drive they can have all my family photos and pirated music and copies of "office 2003" if they want it.
I'm more concerned about its loss, than someone else's gain. I always take my portable backup drive on vacation, wrapped in some foam in the trunk. If the house burns down while I'm gone, I have my family photos and pirated music collection.
I do pop out the internal drive and hide it. If a thief steals my PC (which is doubtful, my PC is a heavy full sized tower case, they all want laptops and iPads now it seems), he'll have a dead box with no OS or storage.

[IndianaHiker]

Depending on how much data you have cloud storage maybe an option. This way your data is stored off site. External drive are great but they do fail. Also thumb drives are not for long term data storage. Enough writes and re-writes they will fail.

[Gondor]

Thanks guys. This is why I started this conversation. Some people don't even use software protection but buy those hardware encrypted drives, which are much harder to penetrate.

[Barney]

Talking about these perhaps: Amazon.com: Corsair 16 GB Padlock 2 USB 2.0 Flash Drive CMFPLA16GB: Electronics I don't have one myself but I heard a lot of great things about them. You may want to check them out.

[carmen]

I have never needed to protect mine before and even though we are a tad geeky in this house the thought honestly never crossed my mind. Is this common that most people never do this or something I just overlooked?

[IndianaHiker]

Three problems with the padlock flash drives. 1st no flash drive is made for long term storage they will die. 2nd one more number to remember. You can set a Personal PIN and a Master PIN. Forget them both and enter the code to unlock the device and it erases all data on the drive. Guess you could take a sharpie and write the PIN on the device. Yes laugh at that but I have seen things just like this done. 3rd these things use an internal battery to keep the password. It charges via USB. In my opinion just one more point of failure.

If you really have data that you need secure then carrying around with you is not a good idea to begin with. If it is stuff that is that sensitive it should be stored on a secure server. You can then access via a secure VPN tunnel or from the cloud. Anything that can be carried can be left behind. Personally not sure what the average Joe would have that they need to carry with them on a regular basis that needs to be that secure.

[Marshmallow]

I've heard that AmazonS3 works well if you have lots of video files or photo files. I have my photos at Phanfare as well as on an external hard drive. I used to use Kodak.com, with the intention of converting my best photos to archival CDs. Who knows what will really work for the long haul?

[Newanderthal]

Flash can take frequent use (3-4x weekly) for about a year, then the risk of data corruption goes through the roof. Flash drives are designed for transfer of data, not storage.

A good hard drive with backup software will work, but you need to periodically check the drive to make sure it's still in good working order. Hard drives wear out. After about 2 years, buy a new backup drive so you can have 2 copies of your backups.

For a great backup, email your most important documents to yourself. Yahoo has unlimited storage for email accounts. Take advantage of that. I have a folder in my email full of attachments. Some are 8 years old.