Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Reliance on the digital world

On our recent trip in the Plus 4, France (Brittany), Ireland, North Ireland, Scotland, Lakes District, Canterbury, France, Germany, Switzerland, then home, we took a certain amount of cash in Euro, Pounds, and Swiss Francs, but almost everything was paid using the app on my phone, and my multi-currency Wise account.
It worked everywhere without any problems. The account is now somewhat slimmer but we came back with almost as much cash as we left with. In fact more GBP than we left with because I made a cash withdrawal in order to have some cash in case of necessity, but in the end cash was only used for very small purchases.
Perhaps it is because I have worked a lifetime in information technology but I have no concerns about using it at all. I do have mixed feelings about being tracked by Google but I can turn off the settings if I wish and I do find it interesting to be able to use the technology to follow my movements.
We just had a week in Croatia, at the sea, and now that Croatia has joined the Euro Zone I was able to pay everything, including tolls but not some parking metres, using the app on the phone, without even adding another currency.

In other IT news Musk is limiting access to Twitter, apparently because of aggressive data mining by robots. In this case a robot is not a mechanical device but a program that can setup hundreds, or even thousands, of fake accounts to access social media. A tried and proven system that is also used to spread propaganda, influence public opinion to influence elections, and influence the outcome of referendums (sound familiar?).

https://www.reuters.com/technology/...address-data-scraping-system-2023-07-01/

Not wishing to tempt fate but up here in the Rockies we have very good cable internet service which only occasionally fails during extreme weather conditions i.e. 5 feet of snow, our house is just under 3 miles from the cable box. On the other hand the postal service is certainly not reliable and depends on which way the wind blows or how many horses are available.

It's not the broadband internet connection that's the problem. My broadband provider and email host has a major problem with their email servers. It has been going on for 2 weeks now with some service available, but many can't access any emails sent more than 2 weeks ago. Until this sort of thing happens we don't really think about the consequences putting all our data on on-line servers.
My wifes iMac has limited storage. Apple encouraged her to save everything in iCloud. Obviously if the internet connection goes down that isn't accessible and even worse should the iCloud servers fail in someway there is a potential for complete data loss. We prefer to keep our data in house on suitable hard drives with regular backups.

Now when I was a lad😎 important papers were copied & stored. Now they get copied & stored & typed onto a computer & stored.
Um computers were supposed to 1/2 the work not double it🥃🤨

Think of it like this..

1. I have data. I save it to my computer. Ahh the good old days. Life was simple.
2. I have enabled the "backup to cloud option" so I am safe. Do I trust them?
3. I have a copy of it in house on a small disc or USB backup just in case.
4. If my house should burn down I have a copy of it safe elsewhere?

What is safe? Secure so others cannot gain access to it for subversive goals. So you cannot just "copy it" you need to copy it in a safe manner. Your data is your online ID and so if someone were to find it what possible impact could it have? So ensure it is encrypted. If it is online use a big%%long**nasty!!complex password and ensure it is encrypted.

So what do you do for computermabobs.

1. I use and trust the MS and Apple cloud backup. Apple more so because they have privacy as the core of their values.
2. I do a physical backup to an external USB disc which is encrypted with a password (256 bit encryption) which I keep at an external site. Once a month.

There is one other thing. You have NO backup unless you test it.
Do some type of restore at least annually to ensure it is working.

I have a NAS box on my home network that backs up my laptop nightly to a mirrored RAID.
I backup manually to an external drive monthly.
I take an annual backup to my mother-in-law who keeps it under her bed!
All my photographs are backed up to Amazon Prime.
Some, if not all, of my files are backed up to a Google drive. If it came to it, I could probably find out how that works and restore them!

I'm traditionally paranoid about losing anything but as time goes on I'm more and more of the opinion that I probably don't need most of this stuff anyway!

All my photos are on my Google Drive. Don't take many. Same with my contacts and diary, and a few 'To do' lists for cars/bikes

I have nothing else that I need to save or back up........

Mind you, my heating, lights, plug sockets, CCTV, music etc is all controlled by magic and if the wifi went down we'd have a few issues......

VirginMedia into meltdown again yesterday. Wimbledon was not an easy watch...




We were unable to use iPlayer as the broadband was also down.

In the evening we resorted to watching a DVD. I thought that would be foolproof but for some reason the sound played at full volume and couldn't be adjusted. I hope the neighbours enjoyed the film!