Hi everyone. I'm wondering what people here might make of the idea of embracing cloud computing for my genealogy, and of the potential risks of doing so?
My situation is this: I have a young family and a full-time job, so my time to work on researching and writing up my family history is very limited - largely to occasional evenings and even more occasional lunch hours, in fact. I keep my digital files on my home laptop, but would love to be able to access them remotely - for when I get a chance to work on them from my desk at work, or on business trip journeys, for example.
I have also come to appreciate the "backup" advantage having my files stored in the cloud would give me, as opposed to using external hard drives and the like.
But... (and it's a big but)... I worry about security and privacy. By their very nature, a lot of family history documents are very personal - and not just to me, but to my relatives. Putting my own birth certificate into Google Docs, Dropbox, OneDrive or the like would be one thing; putting my relatives' documents there too would be another. Quite aside from making such documents available to snooping organizations like Google, it would surely leave me and others open to the possibility of identity theft, too.
There are, I know, far more secure online backup services than the likes of Google Docs, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive - things like Backblaze, SpiderOak and Carbonite - but if you use them then you generally have to sacrifice some of the syncing/collaboration/productivity tools which are the very appeal of Google, Dropbox and Microsoft.
So, I'm left wondering if this might just be a pipe dream, that genealogy and cloud computing really aren't all that compatible.
Is there anyone who could convince me otherwise? I'm sure that it would be feasible to just keep your current working documents within something like Google Docs and to keep more sensitive personal files backed up to a properly secure, encrypted online backup service, but I don't really want to scatter my files around different online locations. I want to have everything in one place. What I would really like is to find somewhere that I could both securely store my genealogy files AND work on them from different locations.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts and opinions, and I really look forward to hearing what people think/what others might do with their own digital files.
Cheers!