Secure Portable Data Storage...

[Deleted member 737]

Tax time at the homestead. I'm running through a mound of older paper and having a brainfart: What do you guys use for portable SECURE data storage? I could scan these, save physical space, organize everything and it sure sounds easier than keeping the paper for years on end. Good idea? Or Pandora's box?

 

[bretti_kivi]

you may *have* to keep the paper.

Secure and portable? doesn't really exist. Start with Pointsec and work your way through from there.

Bret

 

[gorn]

I store all of my old tax info in .pdf format and keep them on and encrypted thumb drive. The thumb drive has a fingerprint reader built in. You could just get an encryption program and store them on disc or HDD. But make sure to keep an extra copy of the files at a different location to be safe.

 

[Kiessling]

Paper beats the digital stuff. We can read books that are thousands of years old, but we can't read files that are 20 years old as technology has moved on.

 

[Beamhead]

Paper beats the digital stuff. We can read books that are thousands of years old, but we can't read files that are 20 years old as technology has moved on.

My Quicken data goes back to 1993, it has survived multiple software/hardware upgrades.
I hate when I do a report on total spent clear back to 93.:faint:

 

[baterija]

You might want to check out Truecrypt. It's freeware and offers excellent encryption. It's got a portable version that will run off the thumb drive so you can access the data anywhere without installing the software as long as you have admin priviledges. Down side of using it for long term archival backup is password management. If you lose the password you're not going to be able to crack the password...that's the point after all.

Instead of encryption you might consider some form of physical security for your archived data. Storing it in a safe deposit box for example.

 

[Deleted member 737]

What kind of thumbdrive do you guys recommend?

https://www.ironkey.com/

 

[gorn]

What kind of thumbdrive do you guys recommend?

https://www.ironkey.com/

Ironkey drives are nice but I think they are way over priced. I would be comfortable with any name brand drive using encryption. I would shy away from the generic drives like you find at DX and places like that.

I worked on a regional high tech crimes task force until I retired. You would be amazed at the punishment these drives could handle. The biggest problem we had with them was back in the day of original windows XP. The OS didn't handle removable drives very well and had a habit of corrupting them. Those days are long gone though.