I am using MS Onedrive and am keeping any personal information in their “Personal Vault” which is encrypted. I know nothing about encryption. If someone tells me this is a bad solution I am prepared to be enlightened…
Not a big specialist myself, but: who has a key to decrypt? Only you or Microsoft?
Seems like a perfect way to lose data in the long run. I only trust big established players - AWS, google, azure, backblaze and a few others. Everyone else you really don’t know long they are going to stay in biz so a lifetime offer is anything but
I know that sucks to lose your photos, but with a simple HDD and a full copy in your laptop you should be OK.
if your laptop got stolen you have the HDD and if your HDD got broken you have your laptop.
you do not need to have a NAS, HDD and so on to be in a save side.
What is it the probability of getting both broken at the same time?
I am pretty sure that we run in a more risk with the money that we invest 
Thanks a lot for the pointer which prompted me to read up on the topic. You are correct a malicous Microsoft employee could in theory access my Personal Vault data. I am just trying to brainstorm the scenario this would be a big issue for me. Tax offices already have my financial information and banks and brokers share information internationally. I do not have a public profile that would result in hackers targetting me. Most financial institutions have dual factor identification The probability of a rogue employee seems low considering Microsoft is a blue chip company with strong recruitment processes. And if a Wikileaks mass leak scenario arises, I could change passwords
I looked at Boxcryptor and will think about it further. One question for me would be losing the password and not being able to access any of my data, or the company going bust, but I guess I can figure out workarounds. Another doubt is user friendliness, if the security process becomes too unfriendly with multiple layers and clunky, my family will bypass it (have seen this happening at work where people just ignore the security protocols when they are in a hurry)
A related question I have is security of this forum. I have seen others posting their Net Worth. Kudos to those doing it, but isn’t that more risky than a rogue MS employee publishing data (?)
We tried this. It was not fool proof (and I am readily admiting we are fools). Problems :
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It relied on regularly plugging in and backing up to the HDD. In the real world with busy lives we did not manage to do this. Nowadays perhaps back up to HDD can be automated over wifi (?)
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If you have kids, you will have photos and videos and a laptop storage will get full or almost full and performance will be lost. We ended up with some photos only on the HDD
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We did not want a static desktop or hard drive in the house so we had a portable one. Guess what my wife dropped it, it broke, data lost.
So you would need 2 HDDs. Cloud just seems a much more elegant solution for photos.
Since it seems the main usecase for people here is to store photos. Here’s my solution, just use Google Photos. I have all my pictures since 2014 stored there for free.
I’d also be curious to hear about your reasoning for encryption, what secrets do you have to hide from the cloud providers?
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Then I will lose more than a digital storage.
I am there, not much frequently backups.
But the problem is why you want to dump teras of unfiltered photos. if you do not have time to clean why you will have time to watch them.
Anyway a bit offtopic as you are all Backup lovers 
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Sure, but most of the other stuff in your house can be replaced such as furniture, etc., however your photos can’t be replaced.
As I said above, in the past I had all my data on two separate external HDDs and both of them failed at the same time, the probability is low, but not 0.
It used to be free and the price you paid was that you explicitly allowed Google to use your photos to train their AI models. It’s a huge valuable corpus for them!
Unfortunately since June 2021 any new photos and videos you upload will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with every Google Account, so it becomes “less free”.
Ah right. For some reason I got that upgraded to 65GB for free. And that’s enough for now.
lol wat? There’s no logic in what you’re saying at all. Start by spelling out a cohesive argument
The big 3 are in the cloud business for the long run. While it rains money they aren’t pulling out, morals have nothing to do with it it’s basic capitalism. And if you’re talking about NSA and N eyes reading your data, myeah that’s amoral towards citizens of other countries, but you can just roll your own client side encryption, it’s not against the law (yet).
Yes, cloud is a decent option for offsite backup copy, but a second local copy is even better.
I replied to the top poster originally, I wasn’t talking to you. Besides the big 3 and very limited selection of other vendors (just maybe backblaze although after crashplan went out of biz I’m not sure) you can’t really trust anyone long term. Certainly not some random swiss vendors who are just using switzerland as a marketing label to sell. These are just random people after all, who can do a lot worse stuff to your data. At least google/aws/azure have internal controls. Sure you can switch as your vendors go in and out of biz but top poster was talking about “lifetime” offers.
You seem to have some political axe to grind with faang it seems. Whatever. On technical merits your points make no sense.
I store terabytes at google for $10/month. Cheapest unlimited storage on the market. Some of the stuff can get me into legal hot waters (let’s just say I’m not a saint), including with google itself. Do I care about google’s morals and that they scan? Fuck no. I care about getting biggest bang for my buck and that they won’t do a run on my data. For security, in AES I trust.
My advice for us it geeks:
- Using the https://rclone.org/ with different provider ( you can encrypt your stuff if you want )
- Offsite Backup (they have their own infrastructure, also in switzerland zurich ) → https://www.rsync.net/
- Google Drive Business (for unlimited TB, to store not private stuff…education videos, pdfs and more).
I am experimenting with Veracrypt, but that unfortunately it means that all those tools are useless. The veracrypt image can’t be really synched.
I have my Business account since 2 years, only one user + and unlimited…
So maybe legacy offering from google for old customer 
How foolish is it to store a scan of your documents (ID etc) in Google Drive / iCloud? Asking for a friend… On one side, I can imagine many bad things could happen if these landed in the wrong hands. On the other hand, how often do hotels/airports scan your ID and/or passport? All the information provided there is known by your employer, landlord, credit card provider, town hall. How much is real concern, how much is in fear of the mythical hacker?
Regarding photos, I do take many photos, then back it up to Google Photos, but I almost never look at the old ones. But I regret not backing up my old documents, spreadsheets, source code. I lost a lot of stuff because I simply thought I will never need it. You miss stuff the most when you don’t have it anymore…
How is any of that relevant? You seem to have an issue with US companies, fine don’t use them, but that’s your issue. Maybe open a separate thread, best cloud provider subject to this arbitrary “no US companies” constraint. For anyone else they are still the most reliable business partners.
Translation: still uncrackable. Bullshit fearmongering.
It’s still unlimited for grandfathered accounts. You didn’t need 5 business accounts - they didn’t actually check that, the real limit was just ~750GB/day of traffic
Recent protonmail case where they were coerced by a swiss court to spy on a user shows otherwise. Switzerland is a modern western country and plays by western rules. So take your rosy glasses off
Governments/intelligence agencies would have access to those either way, so little extra risk here. Don’t upload anything else you don’t want the governments to know unencrypted
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Sure it can. Just use any backup software that supports chunking, e.g. restic or borgbackup. Or just ZFS for local storage and backup zfs sends between snapshots, much faster too because of proper filesystem support (pure userland backup software would need to re-read whole file, ZFS knows right away what blocks you mutated between snapshots). If you’re serious about backups, surely you’ve heard and using ZFS already.
ZFS has native encryption support these days too. If you don’t target plausible deniablity with hidden volumes - the killer feature of veracrypt, ZFS’s encryption should be probably sufficient. Last i checked you don’t normally (that is if only local law enforcement is your concern, rather than CIA etc) need plausible deniability in CH, no key disclosure laws here that force you to self incriminate.