*Note: This post has accompanying video in which the post is read to you. (In English.) You’ll find the video just below the text.

Don’t get me wrong – online backups are extremely useful, even if you also create a local backup on, say, an external HDD. – But there is something that requires constant attention in regard to online backups: -

Online backups, in theory, are designed to take all the stress out of backing up your data…

You don’t bother backing up your data? Well that makes you like at least 50% of the worldwide number of computer-users – a lot of whom run screaming that they desperately need to recover their data to us geeks when their hard-drive develops a major fault which renders its contents as good as useless. – ‘Sorry but people just do not learn. – If it’s important data then back it up or you’ll lose it. Yes it sometimes can be recovered from a dead hard-drive by a geek with the right equipment and expertise, (One of whom I am not.) for a considerable cost. – But isn’t it a lot easier to create a regular backup than pay a fortune when it’s too late?

…So like I was saying: Online backups, in theory, are designed to take all the stress out of backing up your data. You pay a very reasonable sum to a company such as Carbonite or Backblaze, for instance, and you get an unlimited amount of their disk-space on which you can store all the data from a single computer. Even if you delete a file, providing that enough time has elapsed for your computer to find it, encrypt it, and upload it to their server, it remains on their server so that you can recover it should you need to do so. – Which is all jolly useful as you can archive every single file that ever goes on your computer’s hard-drive.

Now for the downside: If every file you ever have on your computer’s hard-drive is archived, then this includes infected files, viruses, Trojans, spyware, keyloggers, rootkits… Yes it also preserves those too – in an encrypted form, so that nobody will ever know that the gigabytes of storage is crawling with encrypted nasties; like a deep-freeze full of unstable electro-biological time-bombs, all waiting for you to restore them to your hard-drive and set them off or set them ticking again.

Usually, when your computer is infected, the Trojan that you downloaded, hidden unobtrusively amidst a harmless-looking data-package, activates, and, after opening a port so that it can communicate with other computers, discharges a malicious payload onto your hard-drive. The various malware in this payload hides itself in clean files and infects them. Then it goes about doing whatever it’s been created to do whilst at the same time seeking to spread itself around your disk as well as to other computers via the open port and via the internet.

Your online-backup software notices a change in an infected or uninfected file – and an uninfected file that becomes newly-infected is recognised by the online-backup software as a file to back up – and thinks to itself

“I haven’t backed that up yet!”,

So it does exactly that. Meanwhile you’re looking for a cure for the malware, find it, eradicate the infection, and life goes on. If, by some action, you lose a file and need to download it from backup, however, you may notice that you have several copies of the same file in your online-backup. – And chances are that most of them are infected with malware.

You want an instant solution? Bad news: There isn’t one. All you can do is to try and remember which files were infected and delete them from your online backup… OR you could delete everything and make a new online backup. That’s easy to do if you’ve only got about a gigabyte of files to save. If, like me, you have around 139GB of files then that might take a few months to achieve. (I know that a few of my backed-up files are infected though. – One of them with all kinds of nasties too. )

OK, do be aware of this. If anyone has any better solutions then please post them as a comment. I’m sorry that I have no super-fixes for this one myself.