I just can’t get past the idea of trusting anybody, other than myself, with my data.
At some point, somebody body with a societal changing idea is going to lose that patent, because these storage-cloud companies will steal it and cover their tracks.
And there won’t be anything you can do about it.
I totally agree.
A smart guy would invest in a Carbonite competitor, get them to pick up Carbonite’s Limbaugh spots and then watch their investment appreciate while Carbonite goes down in flames.
Ditto! Only a fool would farm out the data to 3rd parties, and LOTS of people and businesses are doing it. If a business wants a "cloud", they should build their own. People should do their OWN external backups. It doesn't take an IT genius to set it up. As a matter of fact, most external drives even come with software to automate the process, for those that can't do it themselves.
Giving all of your data to nameless faceless people on the other side of the world is worse than not having any backups at all.
I'm with you. Banks, gubmint organizations, etc. can't even keep their databases safe. How many times do we hear about Megabank getting hacked? It's bad enough that the companies I deal with trust my personal data with buck-o-five-an-hour Indians and Filipinos.
If you backup your data with a company that lets you specify your own private key, then your data is encrypted on your machine BEFORE it goes up into the cloud ... and not even the CIA can decrypt it with all the computers in the world.
If, on the other hand, you let the company provide the key, then yes they could in theory get at your data.