Comment by cm2187
10 years ago
If you are the victim of a crypto locker, you don't really have a choice. In fact it is true of any hostage situation. Parents of a kidnapped kid only have one solution. It is the authorities role to ensure that the hostage takers end up in a jail or a coffin, otherwise impunity will fuel criminal behavior.
Kidnapped kid versus restoring a back-up. That's not a fair comparison.
If you have a working backup you are not really held hostage in the first place. But many people backup to an external drive or a NAS, which unless they happened to be offline at the time of the attack would also be compromised.
A backup is a copy of your files on another medium physically disjoint in space and not connected to the original in any way that you verify is correct after having written a copy.
Anything less than that is not a backup but a mirror and mirrors while useful are not at the same level of security that a backup is.
Some copies are backups, but not all of them and most copies on spinning or re-writeable media especially when they are networked are not actually backups. Somebody tell backblaze ;).
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