Digital Life in Dangerous Clouds

A couple of weeks ago, Mat Honan wrote a must-read post for those of us who love this version of living dangerously: How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking.

With lots of help, and after spending considerable sums of money, his digital life appears to be back on track: How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking. Towards the end of this post, he gets to the lessons from this nasty episode:

I’ve been asked again and again what I’ve learned, and what I now do differently. I’m still figuring some of that out.

I’m certainly a backup believer now. When you control your data locally, and have it stored redundantly, no one can take it from you. Not permanently, at least. I’ve now got a local and online backup solution, and I’m about to add a second off-site backup into that mix. That means I’ll have four copies of everything important to me. Overkill? Probably. But I’m once bitten.

And then there’s the cloud. I’m a bigger believer in cloud services than ever before. Because I use Rdio, not iTunes, I had all my music right away. Because I use Evernote to take reporting notes, everything that I was currently working on still existed. Dropbox and 1Password re-opened every door for me in a way that would have been impossible if I were just storing passwords locally via my browser.

But I’m also a security convert. [...]