Storage or VPN

[martint235]

I've received a couple of offers: 2TB of storage for life or lifetime VPN service. Both are around the £35 mark but particularly with the storage one am I likely to be looking at about 5 years rather than a lifetime.

Which would my techie forummers recommend?

 

[vernon]

Thirty five quids worth of pies.

it's a no brainer.

 

[accountantpete]

For the VPN you would have to look why you need it, the level of encryption you are getting and how much is it going to slow down your pc (you only really notice it when streaming).

 

[martint235]

For the VPN you would have to look why you need it, the level of encryption you are getting and how much is it going to slow down your pc (you only really notice it when streaming).

Yeah I'm fairly open. VPN seems to be a trend but I'm not sure how I'd benefit. I've got very strong firewalls in place so do I really need encrypted traffic? I do have TOR on the Linux side but rarely use it.

I guess it's a question of how many years I could expect from the storage

 

[vernon]

Yeah I'm fairly open. VPN seems to be a trend but I'm not sure how I'd benefit. I've got very strong firewalls in place so do I really need encrypted traffic? I do have TOR on the Linux side but rarely use it.

I guess it's a question of how many years I could expect from the storage

It's more like a question of is your £35 well spent on either of the two solutions. Do you really need them or are you trying to convert a want into a need?

 

[martint235]

It's more like a question of is your £35 well spent on either of the two solutions. Do you really need them or are you trying to convert a want into a need?

A good point Vernon. With storage my main concern is that all the photos from the last 10 years exist solely on my hard drive. I do have a 2TB raid set up so I'm ok for hard drive failure but.... I have no off site back up.

However I also have no off site back up for my older physical photos

 

[User33236]

I had unlimited storage from a company a few years back and gave up on it after a year. The problem is the asymmetric way most broadband connections work. Fast for downloading but slow for uploads. When I went to back up my Lightroom catalog, which was several hundred GB in size the upload box indicated if would take many weeks to complete.

Upload speeds are improving but will, I suspect, remain a bottleneck for large offsite storage for some time to come

 

[Absinthe Minded]

I would go VPN but only if you get decent encryption and speed. You only need VPN if you are concerned about people like the NSA and GCHQ spying on you, or if you are downloading torrents, or similar.

I use a paid VPN when I need to, but it can affect page load speed on the net.

 

[martint235]

I would go VPN but only if you get decent encryption and speed. You only need VPN if you are concerned about people like the NSA and GCHQ spying on you, or if you are downloading torrents, or similar.

I use a paid VPN when I need to, but it can affect page load speed on the net.

I don't really do that kind of stuff. I do some searches I'd rather not have traced but I use tor for those.

My upload is short of 1mbps but I only have about 40gb of photos. Happy to leave pc on all night.

So I think I've ruled out vpn already, Thanks.

The issue with storage is will this company still be there in 10 years? I also have a lifetime password service with the same concern

 

[martint235]

[QUOTE 4163514, member: 259"]Why are you messing around with complicated solutions? If you only have that much data, buy a couple of 128gb USB keys and copy everything to them every week. Keep one at work and the other in the neighbour's house or wherever.[/QUOTE]
No off site but there's an old world solution to that. Vernon's more pies option is starting to win. Thanks all.

I'm too much of a geek and look for solutions where I don't have a problem

 

[PaulSecteur]

VPN... Vernons Pie Network.

 

[TVC]

[QUOTE 4163514, member: 259"]Why are you messing around with complicated solutions? If you only have that much data, buy a couple of 128gb USB keys and copy everything to them every week. Keep one at work and the other in the neighbour's house or wherever.[/QUOTE]
Similar, I have my important, non sensitive pictures and records on a USB store kept somewhere else.

 

[slowmotion]

[QUOTE 4163514, member: 259"]Why are you messing around with complicated solutions? If you only have that much data, buy a couple of 128gb USB keys and copy everything to them every week. Keep one at work and the other in the neighbour's house or wherever.[/QUOTE]
I'm with this^^^^^^. You can put all your photos on an SD card for about £7. Buy a dozen cards and bury a few in the garden or something. Why trust them to a bunch of fly-by-nights out there on the internet? Do you remember that cryogenic company in California who took shed loads of money off relatives of corpses to keep them frozen? They stopped sticking liquid nitrogen into the containers......but still sent out the invoices every month.

 

[goo_mason]

I've received a couple of offers: 2TB of storage for life or lifetime VPN service. Both are around the £35 mark but particularly with the storage one am I likely to be looking at about 5 years rather than a lifetime.

Which would my techie forummers recommend?

I got the same offer (I think) recently, and had a good look at them as I already pay for a VPN and cloud backup. I did some research on the offers, and they came nowhere near the levels of service, security and encryption that my existing providers give, and at least one of them was a new kid on the block & viewed with some suspicion as to whether it'd still exist in a few years.

For info, I use Private Internet Access for my VPN and CrashPlan for my cloud backup for my PC, NAS and two laptops. ( I also backup to an external HDD for extra security too).

 

[TVC]

I got the same offer (I think) recently, and had a good look at them as I already pay for a VPN and cloud backup. I did some research on the offers, and they came nowhere near the levels of service, security and encryption that my existing providers give, and at least one of them was a new kid on the block & viewed with some suspicion as to whether it'd still exist in a few years.

For info, I use Private Internet Access for my VPN and CrashPlan for my cloud backup for my PC, NAS and two laptops. ( I also backup to an external HDD for extra security too).

Out of interest is this business or personal stuff?

I work with a couple of ex burglars and I know that if someone breaks into your house and takes your lappy all they want to do is wipe the hd to reduce traceability, most will just try to flog it in the pub for a fix and the mug who buys it will be incapable of getting past your user password. As was suggested on QI of all places, just write your user names and passwords in a book. Nobody who breaks into your house or small business has got the nounce to raid your finances, they just want to flog what they can carry out.