Canada Post Personal Vault (Tech Beat)

August 4, 2015

Do you need safe online storage for confidential information such as passwords, birth certificate, bank accounts, medical records, passports, tax returns, wills, insurance and other legal documents that you might need to access anytime, anywhere, or to share with your family members?

Canada Post has a Personal Vault service that provides bank-grade security and keeps your information on servers physically located in Canada. The Personal Vault is not meant to be cloud storage for your massive photo and movie collection but rather a secure place for your important personal, financial, medical information and your most valuable photos and videos. For this reason, file size is limited to 200KB each file and 3.5MB for photos and 10MB for videos. Picture this as an electronic safety deposit box, the contents of which you can access 24/7 whether you are at work, at home, or travelling.

Setup is straight forward. All you need to do is to create an ePost account (if you don’t already have one), pick a Personal Vault Plan and sign in. You can upload your own files or use the provided forms to quickly enter information such as bank accounts, passwords, prescriptions, etc.

Pros	Cons
Data and all backup stays in Canada No data is replicated outside of Canada Bank-level security Encrypted upload and download at 128 bit SSL. 256 bit AES encryption on data stored in the vault Easy to use Inexpensive	Small file size Small storage size Confusing website with lots of broken links Server maintenance can occur during the day (but usually on weekends)

A trial account of 100MB storage is free for 90 days (500 documents, 28 photos, 10 videos). A Bronze account of 1GB storage is $23.95 a year (5,000 documents, 285 photos, 100 videos).  Silver and Gold accounts are available if you require more storage space. Give it a try.