I really do not want to put everything in a cloud because it does not seem safe. A lot of reports of people having it hacked. Can I put my photos and docs on a external hard drive and store it in a chest freezer? Then in a emergency like fire my data will be secure?
Storing your photos and documents into an external hard drive and then putting it inside a chest freezer, I’m not sure if that’s safe with your files. I’ve already done that to revive a faulty old hard drive and it worked. I was able to use the hard drive for several more months until it completely failed. But that is on an unstable and faulty hard drive.
In your case, it is a perfectly working piece of device and I don’t think you should place it inside a freezer just to keep your files safe from fire. In case of fire, who knows what will happen to the freezer and the stuffs you put inside. If the worst thing happens, you will end up with an unusable external hard drive.
If you are very unsure about using the cloud to store your files, you can put your files inside an archive or put your files inside a folder then compress that folder using any file compressor adding a password to it. This way, only you can open the compressed file. A password-protected archive is not that easy to crack.
If the password is complicated or composed of letters and numbers, it will take days before a person can crack the code. It will test his patience and might end up abandoning your file.
