I agree paper is incredibly twentieth century. But I also take your point that you, that we all, need in our possession some sort of record, some sort of proof of account.
One suggestion I have is to, first, bring up your account listings on your screen, then photograph the screen or do a screen capture and store that information digitally at home. This way there is no paper, but you nevertheless can reproduce a record of your account balances should you ever be challenged. With luck the bank or credit unionās logo will appear as well on the page you photograph or capture, adding to authenticity.
But will that work if the bank has a system wide failure such that ALL depositors records are wiped? Is the bank going to believe everyone that does that? Not hard to photoshop $10,000 to $100,000 as your account balance.
But what exactly are you worried about? An intentional breach or just a hard drive failure? The bankās information is replicated across various systems almost instantaneously. Then they most likely have physical backup tapes actually physically stored and locked up somewhere with information thatās too old to be kept accessible.
Most will keep information in a variety of data centers across the country/world so a fire or physical breach of one data center doesnāt wipe out the information. I donāt know that much about banks, but in other industries, its pretty rare for the company to run its own data centers. And a company like Amazon or Equinix just simply wouldnāt let a bank run on its system without shelling out for appropriate data replication, etc. If a bank is storing all its data on some shared hosting server with web.com then you should be worried, but Iād hope the regulators would have something to say about that.
As someone else mentioned - all money in/out involves a third party somewhere. If two different entitiesā data is destroyed at the same time, then itās true that you probably canāt recreate, but this can happen to any small bank regardless of whether theyāre online based or not. Iād even argue that its more likely the online based bank would be less likely to suffer such a catastrophic data loss because their entire structure is online, meaning they certainly have people who understand data security and the importance of replication.
Not really worried as much as just thinking out loud of the what ifs from having money in a bank without so much as a paper document to prove itās or my existence.
While not an online bank, the ongoing issues at British bank TSB reminded me of this thread. I donāt know if there are legal or regulatory differences that might make this kind of scenario less likely here.
