The Lance J. Technoweb

All "cloud backup" services encrypt data using industry-leading encryption algorithms so that you can trust that your data is secure. Except that's not true.  Although these companies do encrypt your data, the vast majority of these services keep a copy of your encryption key, which they can secretly use at any time to look at all of your data. Sure, these companies likely want to do the right thing for reputational reasons, but the same could be said for Equifax and CapitalOne and Experian and hundreds of other finance and healthcare companies that each spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on their computer systems.  Just taking a look at data theft throughout the industry and we have to ask ourselves: WHY should anyone have confidence in a backup service that has full access to all of my data? To put the nail in the coffin, all these services have legalese that makes it clear that they are not responsible for any data theft caused by their failures.  They si...

The hard disk in your Mac can fail at any time. And they often do. I'd guess that the chance of any computer owner having a hard drive failure within the next year is 10%, regardless of the age or brand of the computer. If your hard drive fails, the odds are very good that you will have NO HOPE FOR RECOVERY. All your photos, music and documents are likely to be GONE FOREVER. Backup is key if you don't want to permanently lose all your photos and music and other important bits of data. Here's how to do it on the cheap. Simple and Inexpensive Backup Devices For Your Mac The easiest way to back up your Mac is via the built in TimeMachine backup program. But to use it, you need to buy an external backup drive first. An external drive used to backup a MacBook My recommendation is to buy a USB 2.0 backup drive with 1 TB of storage. They're inexpensive (under $100), they have substantial capacity, and they're very easy to use. Personally, I love the inexpensive but v...

For years I've had an RSYNC backup solution for my immediate family's computers. Each computer would perform a remote RSYNC over SSH to my home Linux box on a daily basis. It worked great, but it was a pain in the butt for a few reasons: Lots of parts to maintain. A lack of on-disk encryption. No easy restoration process. Required me to have a server powered up all the time. Recently, I stumbled upon a Mac and Windows internet backup solution for the grand price of Free. It's called Mozzy Home, and its pretty darn good for the following reasons: It's free for the first 2 GB of storage It supports encryption - Mozy can't even see your file content (but it does appear that they can see your filenames and directory structure) It is super easy to set up The client software is pretty good, and supports easy restores. You can get a free Mozy Home account here (shameless referral code attached): https://mozy.com/registration/free The biggest limitation with the (free) M...