Living in the cloud

There is much talk these days of  "cloud computing" not all of it by people who have really tried it.  One criticism is about privacy - if you don't know where your data resides, how can you be sure that it is safe from prying eyes.  If you are storing personal data about yourself and others, then clearly you have a responsibility of care with that data.

This got me to thinking about the idea of living with no data stored on any PC, but being able to access it anywhere.  I would be proof against hardware theft, failure and upgrade.   As a real digital squirrel where data is concerned, this sounded a great idea, but how to deal with the data security?  Encryption sounded like an answer, but what a pain having to unlock every file before using it and ensuring it is encrypted afterwards.  What I really wanted is to be able to unlock a secure file space at the start of a session and lock it afterwards.  I haven't taken the plunge and gone fully cloud, yet, but I have realised my goal of living with no data on any computer.  This is how it works.....

I have a 300 GB USB external drive that has been encrypted using Truecrypt.  As versions of Truecrypt are available for  Linux, Mac and Windows (yes I use all three) I am not tied to any particular computer. All my data resides on this encrypted drive which is unlocked using a password I generated at random.  Once unlocked an unencrypted drive is mounted and I use it happily for my entire session.  At the end of the session I unmount it and my data is secure. It is backed up to a similar encrypted disk very, very regularly.

I now feel much more comfortable travelling.  Most of the time I just carry the backed up 300GB drive.  If it is lost or stolen it will probably end up being used as a music store.  I can rest assured that I have done everything possible to protect the data.  When I carry a laptop, it is just a bare system with no data.  Its loss or failure would be irritating, not a disaster.  Upgrading it is really easy.

Of course the next step is to have my primary data store in the cloud.  I'm not quite ready to do this yet, but I find I like the idea.  I suspect it is only a matter of time before the tools to do this become routinely accepted and my encrypted hard drive will be obsolete.