Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Secure Cloud backup -e.g., Digital Lifeboat - what alternatives are there?

(1/2) > >>

IainB:
Doing some research to see if there was a really secure Cloud-based backup solution, I googled the subject, and one of the things I came up with was a rather novell (to me) service called Digital Lifeboat. The service was apparently launched sometime in early 2011, however, for unexplained reasons it is to be shut down on 2013-06-28.
If you go to their website: http://www.digitallifeboat.com/
you get shunted to: http://www.digitallifeboat.com/ShuttingDown.aspx
- where you get this message:
Secure Cloud backup -e.g., Digital Lifeboat - what alternatives are there?

The email sent to users apparently said (this from a utorrent forum post):
Secure Cloud backup -e.g., Digital Lifeboat - what alternatives are there?

What is Digital Lifeboat?


* The operational principle of the service seems to be automated data backup via distributed encrypted file fragments (using steganographic techniques) across a P2P network, offering a highly secure and sort of virtual RAID storage with "repairable" data. It looks amazingly secure and potentially useful for any PC user wishing to have a high level of security, privacy and anonymity of backup.


* The concept is explained:

* in a YouTube video here: Free Online Cloud Backup Security from Digital Lifeboat

* in some quite good blog posts covering some relevant issues, here.
* in "About Us" on their website, where it says:
SpoilerHow Do We Do It?
Digital Lifeboat has been created for all personal computer users who store photos, music, videos and documents on their PCs and would be sad if they lost them. It is our vision to create a software service which protects your “digital treasures” with easy to use software. We are building a business and promise to serve our customers, and to be there when we are most needed.

Our founders have an extraordinary amount of experience with centralized storage, or what many would call “data centers.” They understand the cost and time to set them up and run them. They also know that they have significant security and operational risks. It was with this knowledge that we started Digital Lifeboat, a distributive storage model for online backup and recovery.

It is our belief that as our lives become more digital, and as we store more of our memories, our finances, our entertainment and our work life on our computers, we need a simple and secure way to protect those files, and restore lost or deleted files. As simple as that sounds, what we do is very complicated. Our solution is a distributed storage cloud service. Digital Lifeboat will compress and encrypt each file selected for backup. We then process your encrypted file with an Erasure Coding algorithm that creates many fragments of your file. Once these fragments are prepared for transfer into the Digital Lifeboat Cloud, we then securely send and store each of them outside of your home on different computers. These encrypted, erasure coded, fragments are invisible on their storage hosts.

Using advanced steganographic techniques we safely store encrypted, erasure coded, fragments on your PC from other members of the Digital Lifeboat cloud. These fragments are invisible to your computer and it operates as if they are not there. When you add more data to your hard drive, they will automatically be erased if they are in the way. Our service is self-healing and self-managing, so we will replicate those erased fragments and distribute them to other parts of the Digital Lifeboat Cloud. We only use a fraction of your free disk space, but you are never prohibited form adding more data to your hard drive. Indeed, your system does not recognize the data we store, and you do not have to manage it in any way.

DL (Digital Lifeboat) is like an insurance policy for your digital life. We are there when you need us. We are working to make the entire process easy – from installing our software, through the backup process, and of course the most valuable service of all recovering your data.


Whereas I would always evaluate such a service after trialling it and before using/buying it, my initial impression of this untried service is that it would seem to meet all the requirements for a high level of security, privacy and anonymity of backup, with the major potential costs being:

* (a) the direct costs of service and
* (b) the indirect costs of bandwidth utilisation.
Like most other Cloud-based solutions, one major risk this service has/had would relate to its potential for persistent reliability (QED, it has just been unilaterally and summarily discontinued). I would like to know why the service had to be killed.

Perry Mowbray:
Don't know about Digital Lifeboat, but I use SpiderOak and am very happy with it (especially concerning privacy, but also the smarts they use)

I can offer you a referral link if you're interested (increases your free amount of space and gets me a bit more)  ;)

Jibz:
There is a whole range of options that give you different trade-offs between security and ease-of-use.

Something like Tarsnap is probably very secure, but not that easy to use on Windows. At the other end are a lot of the services mentioned in the Help me choose an online backup service thread on this forum.

I think SpiderOak is a good compromise between security and usability.

Personally I use CrashPlan, partly because it runs as a service and can back up other accounts on my computer besides the one I am logged in on (not sure if SpiderOak have implemented this yet), but also because I think the 100 GB increments in data make SpiderOak too expensive (I am paying $60 for 80 GB instead of $100, and if I had 101 GB I would still be paying $60 instead of $200).

4wd:
Tresorit - You can see if you can still get 50GB here.

http://lifehacker.com/5994394/get-50gb-of-free-encrypted-online-storage-from-tresorit

Sorry, on my phone.

Jibz:
It is probably worth making the distinction between cloud storage, syncing, and backup here (although some of these companies are trying to cover more than one area).

Storage usually means you upload files and then you are able to access them from other devices. The cloud acts like a USB drive you always have with you.

Syncing is often a group of files or folders that are automatically uploaded to the cloud every time you make a local change, and downloaded every time you (or somebody else) made a change on another device that has the same files synced. The cloud works as intermediate storage, giving the illusion that the synced files are the same on all devices.

Backup services keep a copy of important files from your computer in the cloud, and make sure the cloud is synced to reflect any changes you make, but keeping backups over time so you can restore any files that were unintentionally changed or deleted (but there is no syncing the other way, and only one source). Here it works a bit like making a regular backup on DVDs.

Amazon offers storage only. DropBox is a good example of storage and syncing. CrashPlan is backup only. SpiderOak seems to do all three.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page