Month: September 2018

Where Are Your Mobile Phone Photos Saved?

Admin on September 27, 2018

Taking photos with a mobile phone rather than a point-and-shoot camera has been the standard method of recording memories for quite some time. It’s convenient, easily accessible, and allows for almost instantaneous sharing. Long lost are the days of waiting for rolls of film to be developed or sitting down to reminisce over physical photo albums; these images are most often stored either on the device itself or within a social media account. What would happen though if you were to lose that device or delete that social media account? If your device isn’t backing up to a particular cloud hosting solution, when the device is lost, your photos would be lost along with it.

Then, of course, there is always the question of the security and reliability of those cloud services. iCloud, for example, has had several breaches that have led to photos being exposed to the public.

Thankfully there’s an alternative. GoodSync is a secure backup and synchronization software that lets you easily back up your mobile photos to a secondary device of your choosing. While existing social media platforms can act as a stand-in, they have never been a secure solution as their terms of service agreements often state that any user-created material uploaded to their platform, relinquishes all client ownership, instead transferring that ownership to the platform. This means that if your images are lost, exposed to an unintended audience, or used for targeted advertising, the platform is in no way responsible. Such policies, for obvious reasons, have led to scrutiny. Cloud hosting solutions are not significantly better as the security and availability of your data is not fully guaranteed. Subsequently, it’s in your best interest to take the additional steps necessary to protect yourself and ensure the availability of your data.

Our previous blog post discussed GoodSync’s encryption capability. Not only can you back up your files to the location of your choosing, but you can also encrypt the data as an added measure of security and privacy. For example, if you choose to save a copy of your files with a popular cloud service provider, with GoodSync’s encryption, you can ensure these providers are not viewing your private images. It’s as simple as checking a box and specifying the password that will be used to encrypt the files. A back up can also be conveniently performed over the internet, eliminating the need for a physical connection. This means that once a backup is scheduled, it can be performed even when you’re on the move.

To recap, by linking your mobile phone with a GoodSync Connect Account, you can automatically sync your mobile photos directly to your home computer, offsite storage location, or cloud hosting provider. This minimizes the consequences of losing your device, while also maximizing your security.

To back up your photos from your Android device, click here.

Data Backup Data Synchronization For Business

Keep Amazon S3 Data Private with GoodSync

Stanko Tomic on September 25, 2018

Many companies rely on cloud storage solutions to store and facilitate the security of their data. One aspect of cloud storage seldom mentioned, however, is the ownership of encryption keys. Although the majority of cloud hosting providers encrypt data stored on their services by default, they do not allow their users to set custom private keys. This results in a vulnerability to the client’s data as the hosting provider maintains read access to anything stored on their servers.

Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) provides its own variant of a cloud storage solution with their S3 offering. Within Amazon’s own manual, the company mentions the potential for vulnerability and states that if users would like to have true client-side encryption, they must use a third-party tool as this functionality is not built into S3. If a user lacks control over the encryption keys and the encryption process, they will always lack the certainty that their data is secure.

GoodSync can provide that certainty with its data at rest AES-256 encryption capability. An Amazon S3 account can be linked to the GoodSync application, which will upload and encrypt all client data in an automated and configurable way. Users can be certain that any data they upload to their S3 buckets is truly secure and private.

You don’t need a license to try this. You can download and run a free fully-functional trial of GoodSync for 30 days. You can also access encrypted files remotely with GoodSync Explorer.

Follow these simple steps to protect your Amazon S3 data:

1) If you haven’t done so already, download and install GoodSync.

2) In the Job menu, select “New” or click the “New Job Button” in the toolbar.

3) In the New GoodSync Job prompt:

Enter the name for your new Job.
Select Backup or Synchronize as your Job type.

Next, select the endpoints for your job.

4) Select the left side and navigate to the location of the data that you would like to encrypt and back up. Note: In our example, we will use a local folder. For all supported services, please click here.

5) If you need to connect your Amazon S3 account, click here.

6) Select the right side and navigate to the S3 location that you would like to back up to.

7) Within the Job Options, select “Right Side” and check the box labeled “Encrypt File Bodies and Names.”

8) Enter a password that you’d like GoodSync to use to encrypt your data. GoodSync will save that password in the job settings; you will also need to remember it (TIP: use a password manager, e.g. RoboForm, to record it) in order to access that data from other devices or to allow other people to access that data.

9) To begin synchronization, the encrypted folder must either contain zero files or only files previously encrypted by GoodSync with the same password that you entered in step 8. If the folder contains any other files, click “Empty Sync Folder” to remove its contents and prepare for synchronization.

10) Click “Test Encryption” to confirm the passwords match. If the folder already contains files that have been previously encrypted by GoodSync, GoodSync will attempt to decrypt them with the key you specified.

11) Click “Save” to commit changes.

12) Click “Analyze” and “Sync” to run the sync.

Below is an example of unencrypted data (left) and encrypted data (right).

Note: to configure the job with automation or other settings please click here.

For Business

Protect Your Personal Data in the Cloud with Encryption by GoodSync

Admin on September 20, 2018

According to an article on Statista[1], in 2018, almost 2 billion people worldwide used personal cloud storage, and it keeps growing. Using four-year-old data, Eurostat[2] calculated that every fifth European (20%) saved files on the Internet in 2014.

According to another article on Statista [3], 44% of cloud storage users are concerned about the privacy of their data.

If you are reading this, you are most likely using or at least considering using one of the cloud file storage services, and you may even be worried about other people obtaining unauthorized access to your data. And if for any reason you’re not, you definitely should be.

The Conversation site in their January, 2018 article “How secure is your data when it’s stored in the cloud[4]?” mentions that none of the popular cloud file storages including Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive, allow users to encrypt their data and keep the key.

What does that mean for you?

If you are using one of the popular cloud file storages, companies that operate these services can obtain access to your data. They can analyze your data. They can share your data, and you often don’t have control over who sees your data. For example, some companies may decide to share user data with authorities under conditions where you would have chosen to not do so yourself.

How do you protect yourself from that threat?

There are two choices: you can build your own cloud (an excellent choice for mid- and large-size companies; GoodSync has all machinery for that) or you can use GoodSync to encrypt your data on the cloud service of your choice.

GoodSync is a cross-platform file synchronization tool that supports all major cloud file storages including Google Drive Files, Google Team Drive, Google Docs, Amazon S3, Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, Box.com, Backblaze B2, OneDrive / Office 365 / SharePoint, SharePoint 2013, MS Azure Blobs, MS Azure Files, as well as any other server connected through Secure FTP (SSH), FTP, or WebDAV. GoodSync also has its own built-in encrypted and compressed storage called OneFile.

GoodSync supports one-way or two-way synchronization. When you create a new synchronization “Job”, you can select two folders that you want to keep in sync. Normally, one of your folders is local (let’s keep it on the left side) and the other is remote (let’s keep it on the right-side).

To encrypt your files on the cloud storage of your choice, go to the Right Side section of Job Options (Job->Options), check the “Encrypt File Bodies and Names” checkbox, and specify the password that will be used to encrypt names and bodies of your files on the remote side.

The “Test” button allows you to check the correctness of the entered password if you are connecting to a remote folder that has already been set up (e.g. if you are accessing a previously set up folder from a different device or if you have decided to share files among a group of people).

The “Empty Sync Folder” clears the remote folder from any files and prepares it for encrypted synchronization operations.

After you hit the “Save” button at the bottom of the window, your GoodSync job will be ready.

Add some files that you want to deliver to the cloud side in encrypted form to the left (Local) folder.

Hit “Analyze” button. You will see that there are some new files on your left (Local) side.

Hit “Sync” button. You will see that some files with garbled names appeared on your right (Remote) side.

You may also notice that if you are not using one of the compressed file formats (e.g., late Microsoft Office, PDF, JPG), your encrypted file is also smaller in size. It happens because GoodSync is also trying to compress the file before encryption.

This is how easy, literally in three steps, you can convert any popular cloud file storage (if it is supported by GoodSync) into an encrypted and compressed storage. You receive the double benefit of compression by enforcing the privacy of your data and saving on storage space.

If you are interested in the details of encryption implementation, please visit the GoodSync technical manual: https://www.goodsync.com/manual#side_tab

You can learn more about business and personal GoodSync solutions on our website: https://www.goodsync.com/

All GoodSync products are available for free trial before purchase: https://www.goodsync.com/download

Sources:

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/499558/worldwide-personal-cloud-storage-users/

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Internet_and_cloud_services_-_statistics_on_the_use_by_individuals

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250191/consumer-concerns-about-cloud-services/

[4] http://theconversation.com/how-secure-is-your-data-when-its-stored-in-the-cloud-90000

Data Backup For Business

Full and Incremental Backup with GoodSync

Admin on September 17, 2018

There are three basic backup types: full, differential, and incremental.

Full Backup creates a copy of all files as they were at the time of the backup.

Differential Backup creates a copy that contains only those files that have been altered since the last full backup.

Incremental Backup creates a copy that contains only those files that have been altered since the last backup, incremental or full.

This article will describe how to implement a daily Incremental Backup with a periodic weekly Full Backup using GoodSync. You can easily implement backups with different frequencies, using information found within this article.

If you do not currently own a GoodSync license, download the free 30-day fully-functional trial.

We will use four GoodSync features:

on-file-change automatic synchronization option
periodic automatic synchronization option
time-based parametrization in folder paths
ability to create destination folders that do not exist

You can read more about these subjects in the GoodSync Manual:

https://www.goodsync.com/manual#auto_tab

https://www.goodsync.com/manual#environment_variables

Step 1: Setting up paths

Source folder: set your left path to be the source folder you want to back up. This approach only works when your source folder is local. This requirement is needed due to the fact that file monitoring only reliably works on a computer’s local drives.

Destination folder: add time-based parameters to the right path to set up the destination folder.

GoodSync supports the following variables:

%YYYY% — current year.

%MM% — current month, from 01 to 12.

%DD% — current day of the month, from 01 to 31.

%DOW% — current day of the week, from 0 to 6.

%WOM% — current week of the month, from 1 to 4.

%HH% — current hour, from 00 to 23.

%II% — current minute, from 00 to 59.

For example, a destination path can be set to:

C:\Backup Destination Directory\Backup %YYYY%-%MM%-%DD%\

Each time GoodSync runs on a new day, it will create a new directory (ensure the “Create Folder if Does Not Exist” option is ON) with the full date. For example, on February 7, 2018 full back will be performed to this directory:

C:\Backup Destination Directory\Full Backup 2018-02-07\

The destination folder can exist on any of the file systems supported by GoodSync:

https://www.goodsync.com/manual#file-systems

Step 2: Setting up automation

Right click on the job you are editing, select the “Options” menu item.

In the Options window, select the “Auto” menu item.

In the auto section, check “On File Change“ and “On Schedule” checkboxes.

Click the “Configure…” button to select the scheduling details:

Click the “Configure…” button and select the desired schedule, e.g., on Sundays:

This particular setting will force GoodSync to perform a full backup once a week on Sundays

What to expect

After you enter all these settings and save the Auto settings, the following will happen:

GoodSync will create a subfolder at a destination folder with today’s date.

GoodSync will perform a full back of the source folder into the destination folder.

After the full backup is finished, GoodSync will start monitoring the source folder for changes and sending copies of all changed / newly created files to the destination folder.

The following day, GoodSync will create a new folder with the new day’s date and will send all changed / newly created file on that date to that new folder.

When Sunday comes, GoodSync will continue monitoring and propagating changes, but at some point will also make a full copy of the source folder to the destination folder.

This process will continue daily.

A data purging process can be performed via scripting. Scripts can either be run on schedule independently or executed as a post-synchronization script for GoodSync.

You can read more about GoodSync built-in scripting here: https://www.goodsync.com/manual#scripts_tab

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Month: September 2018

Where Are Your Mobile Phone Photos Saved?

Keep Amazon S3 Data Private with GoodSync

Full and Incremental Backup with GoodSync