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Why you shouldn’t trust everything to cloud backup

Reasons not to trust everything to the cloud

Saving the backup copies that we make of our PC, photos and any file in the cloud is a great decision, to keep all the copies in a place outside our local network, and to have automatic version control and other features. However, we should never use the cloud exclusively, but rather it should be an addition to the backup copies stored locally. Next, we are going to explain to you why you should not trust your copies only in the cloud, since we could run into problems when trying to recover said copies.

Internet or cloud access not available

If we are facing an emergency and we need to recover the complete backup or only a part, and we do not have an Internet connection or due to some incident, access to the cloud is not available, even if we have the backup, we will not be able to use it because we do not have no way to access it. The solution to not having an Internet connection at a certain time is to share data with the mobile to download the copy, or connect to a public WiFi network and access the cloud using a VPN to protect our security.

In the event that the cloud is not available due to an incident, we will not be able to do anything, just wait until the service is available again. Nowadays this problem is not usually common, since all the competent services have close to 100% availability, but it can always happen that there is precisely an unforeseen incident. Without going any further, we all remember the case of Facebook that was down for about 8 hours around the world.

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Slow to recover the backup

A very important aspect when recovering a backup is speed, to be able to restore all the information we want as soon as possible. If what we are going to recover occupies very little space, then the recovery will be very fast. However, if we have to perform a complete restore and it occupies many GB of data, the speed when downloading the backup is critical. In this sense, it is essential that the cloud servers are physically close to us, that our operator has peering agreements with said service, and that we have a good Internet connection, to download this backup as quickly as possible.

To give you an idea, getting a download speed of about 500Mbps is an excellent figure, the most normal thing is to get speeds between 200Mbps and 300Mbps. If we had this backup on the local network, we can achieve transfer rates of 940Mbps on a Gigabit Ethernet network, and even speeds of 2,400Mbps if we have a Multigigabit network and store this backup on a local NAS.

Cloud intrusion issues

If our cloud access credentials are leaked, an attacker could access our backups and get hold of private information. To mitigate this problem, it is best that all backups that you upload to the cloud are encrypted at source, that is, we make an AES-256 encrypted backup on our PC and a password to decrypt said copy. Once it’s encrypted, we upload it to the cloud using secure protocols like TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 and store it in the cloud which might also apply another layer of encryption.

Therefore, it becomes important to choose a reliable service to make a cloud backup for Microsoft Office 365, Google Workspace and Kubernetes.

gray hat hacker

We should not rely solely on encryption on the server side, because if an attacker gets hold of our credentials, he will still be able to access all the data, since he will impersonate us.

damaged copies

The biggest mistake that we can make is to make a backup and that it is not done correctly, therefore, we will have a damaged copy that will not be of any use to us because we cannot recover the data. When we make a backup it is essential to check that this copy has been made correctly, this process can be done automatically or manually.

If we upload a damaged copy to the cloud replacing another copy (good copy) that was already there, we will be making a big mistake, because we will be left with no backup copies available. For this reason, our recommendation is that you store several copies simultaneously, several days or weeks apart, so that in the event of a disaster due to being damaged, this does not affect the possibility of recovering a good one.

As you have seen, we must not rely 100% on the cloud for our copies, but we must also store the copies locally, either on a NAS server or on a removable storage device. Of course, we should stick with the 3-2-1 backup recommendations to be as secure as possible.

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