Storing backups is a tricky topic to tackle because the backups themselves need to be secured and there are certainly concerns about how accessible your data is, and what type of ownership 3rd parties have over your data. Instead of exploring every specific ethical issue around storing data, here are 3 fundamental rules you can remember:
Local you can protect, but offsite is protected. Any data that is stored locally has the huge advantage of being accessible by yourself whenever you want to just walk up to the machine and login to it. This means that it’s possible to go through whatever measures you wish to protect those backups. Whether that be as something simple as using a power surge protector and a backup power supply or going as far as building your own cloud computing system with 24/7 security. Obviously the feasibility of those latter measures is low for the majority of people reading this guide.
But offsite is not without its advantages. While you cannot access the hardware directly, your data will most likely be in an environment that is not feasible for your personal use, one that has 24/7 security, onsite technicians, fail-safes, fire protection etc. You certainly have less control of the protection, but maybe giving up that control is worth the additional features?
Is your data that important? If you’re data is stored offsite and you’re worried about your data being compromised, ask yourself this: is your data that important? If you’ve setup a system to backup everything to a cloud computing service, and some disgruntled employee thumbs through your database backup and finds your password (which, remember should be a password that is ONLY used with this single installation of Wordpress) is there really a lot that can happen? It’s easy enough to recover your data from another backup destination (see the upcoming “Best Practices for Backups” section) and then just never work with that company again.
It’s certainly appropriate to feel violated if your data has been accessed in such a way, so I’m not justifying the actions of any individuals that do so, but in many cases you’ll realize that 99% of the data your backing up is publicly accessible from the blog anyway. It’s definitely not a reason to deal with dodgy companies but this knowledge will help you make informed decisions.
Larger companies have more to lose. Saying that larger companies are more reliable than smaller companies would be a pretty dumb statement, so I won’t say it (wait, I already did…dammit) but I believe in terms of data storage companies, it’s true.
If, for example, it was leaked that Google employees were reading emails stored in Gmail, it would take just a few minutes for the internet to explode in anger and Google would instantly lose the trust of millions (billions?) of people. On the other hand, some small startup that does the same thing has a lot less to lose and would cause less of a commotion.
