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HOW TO SECURELY BACKUP PERSONAL DATA WITH OFICLOUD

“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”
Tim Berners-Lee

Data is life. Data is wealth. Data is knowledge. Data is entertainment. Data is everything and it should be protected at all costs. In this technology driven world anyone in possession of valuable data, rules.

Storing vital data on our local machines doesn’t suffice anymore. We need a more secure and reliable solution.

The idea of relying on our machines to store data is a not suitable. Our machines can crash, get damaged, get stolen.

Another option that comes to mind is an external drive such as a flash drive, a hard drive, etc. This could serve as a backup too, sadly it has the same disadvantages. Personally, I have experienced first-hand cases of hard drive damage hanging me out to dry.

In summary, all physical storage systems can fail us when we least expect.

One viable solution is the cloud storage. With the cloud we can save data and have access to it anywhere in the world, provided there is internet access. Saving our backups to the cloud is a great option. There are no worries about the weight of physical backup systems, possible damage, theft when using the cloud.

Oficloud provides safe cloud storage services to protect data for absolutely anyone to take advantage of.

So why OfiCloud?

With Oficloud you are the only owner of your data. They can’t access your data as it is always encrypted on origin and the keys safely saved in your own office (or on any server controlled only by you). If they don’t have access to your unencrypted personal data, it’s not personal data subject to data privacy regulations restrictions. It’s as though it’s in your own computer.

Now, let’s get into the thick of things:

Oficloud is easy to use. We would begin this tutorial by downloading and installing the Oficloud desktop application https://www.oficloud.com/install-windows, then creating an account.

You can create backups of files on your local machine using tools like Duplicati https://www.duplicati.com/download.

In this article, I will cover the use of the Duplicati backup system. This doesn’t imply that other backup systems are not good enough, Duplicati just happens to be our choice for this tutorial.

After creating an Oficloud account and logging in, the cloud folders should look like in the image below:

Since it’s your account, you are given permissions to do anything with the folders. If you want to change the folder permissions, you click the … icon on the folder whose permission you would like to change, then click “permission.”

Now that we have dealt with that, let’s set up the folder for our backups on Oficloud.

First thing we would do is to create the folder in the Oficloud app. To do this you’d click on the icon next to “Upload File,” then type in the name of your choice. “Private” would be a good choice, however, for the purpose of this article I’ll be using “SampleBackup.”

After creating a new folder, it should appear among the folders on Oficloud. Now we need to create a folder on our local machine. We will be storing our backups in this folder after synchronizing it with the folder created on Oficloud. We can call the folder anything, however, for the purpose of this article we will be using the name “SampleBackup” as well.

After a successful synchronization, there should be a message popping up on the screen indicating the success of the operation.

Henceforth, any file that is added to the folder on our local machine will be automatically uploaded to the synchronized Oficloud folder.

NB: There should be a small recycling icon on the folder we just synced.

That‘s all we need to do on the Oficloud app.

Now, we can proceed to make backups with the Duplicati backup application.

Backup platforms vary by usage. However, we will discuss things that need to be setup on this platform i.e. Duplicati.

We advise that you do not use the encryption services of the backup application, as Oficloud also does encryption. Double encryption doesn’t improve security and using two encryption services would mean you have to remember the passwords for both Duplicati and Oficloud.

Here is the screenshot of setting encryption in Duplicati:

When creating backups, select the local folder as the folder for saving our backups.

After selecting the local folder, we will then choose the folders or files to be backed up to the folder.

Duplicati has options to create backups at specific times of the week. However, for the purpose of this article we will be backing up only once. Depending on personal preference, you can set your backups to be done automatically.

After setting the schedule for the backup, next is to setup the backup options.

The default is set up to keep all backups.

However, we would be tweaking this to keep a specific number of backups. This ensures that older backups are deleted after some time, to prevent a cluster of backup files you’re not going to want to be taking up space on your local machine.

Here, we choose to keep our last five backups:

After configuring the settings, the next is to click on the save button and then we can run the backup.

When backup is completed, it will be saved to the “SampleBackup” folder as in the case of this article. This can be seen in the image below:

Immediately after the backup is completed, the files are then uploaded into Oficloud folder automatically.

Cool.

The process will be shown on the history section of the Oficloud app, which is updated the moment there’s a file change in the local folder.

There you have it, your backup automatically uploaded to Oficloud. If you decide not to use any backup service, you can also have your files uploaded directly to the cloud storage. All you have to do is copy or move the file into the synchronized folder. And you can be sure of its security, thanks to Oficloud’s encryption feature.

Enjoy the secure cloud storage today   GET STARTED