You have probably heard the story: someone has all their data stored in the Cloud, and one morning it’s all gone. Maybe Google disabled your email account and won’t you let back in. Or maybe it’s Dropbox that dropped your files. Or maybe it’s (and this is a real case) box.com that handed somebody’s account to someone else, who promptly cleaned the account and deleted all the other person’s files.
In information security, the concept of safety includes and extends security. Security is what you need to protect your data from malevolent others. Safety encompasses that, but adds protection from other kinds of mistakes. Like the ones mentioned above.
Here is an analogy: data security is like the walls and doors and alarm systems you use to protect yourself from burglars. Data safety is that plus the smoke detector and the sprinkler system.
Here is what we’ll do: we will use free cloud services to keep an encrypted copy of whatever data we want. We will provide the encryption, and we will make sure the data is “safe,” in that the failure of any single provider will not cause us to lose any data.