Services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Amazon Cloud are great. They allow you to automatically sync your important files between all your computers and other devices, so that they are available from wherever you happen to be. And there's a copy in the cloud, too, for safety.

Personally, I use Dropbox and I like it a lot.

But these cloud-based services have a couple of serious drawbacks. First, remember that you should be wary of regarding these services as a backup. Because your cloud storage is instantly accessible from your PC with a couple of clicks, your files are just as vulnerable as those held on your hard drive. A ransomware attack or a virus will infect or encrypt your cloud files as well as your local ones.

Secondly, you need to think about privacy and confidentiality. When you allow all your data to be uploaded to the cloud, do you know who's able to see it? Would it be a major problem if someone were to hack your Dropbox or OneDrive account and gain access to all your files held online?

If you're in business, and you store your customers' files in the cloud, this is even more important.

One solution is to use a program which adds encryption to whatever cloud service you use. And a well-known example of such as solution is Boxcryptor. Once you install Boxcryptor on your computer, it encrypts some or all (you can choose) of the files in your cloud storage folder. This means that, when they get sent to the cloud, they are already encrypted and thus can't be seen by anyone who manages to hack your cloud account. So long as you have logged into Boxcryptor on your computer and entered the correct password, those files will be automatically decrypted when you try to access them. And then re-encrypted before the cloud program gets to upload the revised version.

Boxcryptor is free to use if you only need it for one cloud storage provider and across no more than 2 devices. It's a 50 MB download and runs on all recent versions of Windows. The installer is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust.  Read More