is google drive safe

[dba7108]

saw an article about a virus called cryptolocker than locks all your files on your pc unless you pay £££ can these viruses target google drive and if so can is there a way to backup all my pictures on Google Pictures without going through and right clicking each one and saving it?

[Wyvern971]

From my understanding, Google drive syncs a folder (of your selection) as well as allowing you to manually upload files.

If that's the case, then I'd have thought any synced folders would be susceptible.

With regards to photos etc, I have 2 accounts, one I use specifically for editing / adding photos, and another I use day to day.

The day to day has read only permissions on the Photos/movies directories.

If I (or someone else using my PC) were to get infected with this nasty, then I'd hope it'd be safe.

As a side note I also back up to Amazon cloud for photos (Unlimited with Amazon prime, currently sat at 324.5Gb).

[mattley]

You've pretty much covered it there.

Crypto locker runs in user space with user permissions and encrypts anything it can find in that user space to which that user has write privileges. As it does it's it's evil thing any sync utility be it google drive, dropbox whatever recognises that the file has changed and syncs it.

I notice that you have to manually add files to your Amazon cloud storage and the old Sync option though it still works, is no longer available. I wonder if Crypto locker is the reason for this.

[abbotsmike]

I've not looked into it on drive (as I only use the online apps suite) but most cloud storage sync providers have some sort of history function, which can enable you to roll back if the worst does happen.