Do you think Google Drive (and others) are secure enough to store personal financial data like Quicken? Sometimes all you need is an email and password to get in.
Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
61–70 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
My solution for ransomware is to have a canary file. Write a script that automates the backup and hardcode a known SHA digest of the file (I like to make it a photo). Before the backup happens, compare the SHA digests. If they match, go ahead with the backup.
What if the encryption has begun, but hasn't reached your canary yet?
This is a great question. It takes some time for the ransomware script to encrypt everything, so it is possible that you catch it in the middle of the encryption but not before it reaches the canary.
You could put hard links to your canary in all of the crucial locations, I suppose.
Or you could use rsnapshot on the destination side and freeze the backup schedule if something looks amiss.
Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#63I'm surprised that no one mentioned Tarsnap yet, it's run by a well known HNer (cperciva): http://www.tarsnap.com/ It's not exactly noob friendly though.
Amazingly expensive though at 25c/GB/m.
I pay Backblaze b2 about $1.60 a month for 280GB of photos. A number that doubles every few years. Today that would cost me $60 on tarsnap. That's not reasonable.
Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#64attic " rel="nofollow">https://attic-backup.org/> encrypts data in transit via ssh, deduplicate and encrypt data at rest. I have come to appreciate both how easy it is to restore data, and the control you have over pruning which backups are kept around. You either need to be able to install attic on the remote host, or be able to mount the file system (i.e. fuse).
Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#65Just stick it all in Google Drive, pay the $2/mo for 100GB or $10/mo for 1TB, done. It stores the last 100 versions of each file so ransomware shouldn't be a problem, although apparently there's no way to restore a folder at a time, you'd need to do it individually for each file...
Is there a good linux client? I couldn't get the ocaml client to work well enough. I'd even be fine with even a one-way backup that backs up my entire ~/ (excluding some specified dirs/files) as snapshots. I don't need even need the two-way sync.
odrive has a Linux client, & supports Google Drive: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/odrive-sync-agent
Haven't actually tried it, seeing as I don't use Linux that often, but it's Python and hence reasonably cross-platform.
Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#66Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#67I have a related question. I want to take backup of certain folders to a portable USB HDD every night. Can anyone recommend any simple solution for that? I don't need encryption or any extraneous features. I just need the selected directories to get mirrored to a backup location. Currently, I am using SyncToy by Microsoft, but I was looking for a cross platform solution.
Found a list here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_synchroniza...
Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#68I'm surprised that no one mentioned Tarsnap yet, it's run by a well known HNer (cperciva): http://www.tarsnap.com/ It's not exactly noob friendly though.
The main issue with Tarsnap we had is it's very slow to restore if you have big backups. Very slow. Big in this case is in the order of a TB or so. We had an incident were we needed to restore some data from backups recently, and it took literally days to get the files we needed back. We were not downloading the entire backup, we just wanted to restore a small subset of files. We migrated away after that.
Can you elaborate on which part of the restore process was slow (downloading the files themselves or something else)?
Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#69I'm surprised that no one mentioned Tarsnap yet, it's run by a well known HNer (cperciva): http://www.tarsnap.com/ It's not exactly noob friendly though.
Amazingly expensive though at 25c/GB/m. I pay Backblaze b2 about $1.60 a month for 280GB of photos. A number that doubles every few years. Today that would cost me $60 on tarsnap. That's not reasonable.
I did the same until Backblaze lost all data from one of my drives, which they didn't alert me about and I discovered abruptly attempting to restore after the physical drive died. Dealing with their customer support is very insecure (sharing your secret in plain text) and they still weren't able to recover the files. I don't see myself using or recommending it to anyone again.
Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it's quite expensive compared to other solutions.
To concur with my sibling commenter zie (who said that tarsnap is not that expensive): $ tarsnap --print-stats Total size Compressed size All archives 1418275826434 1212480481405 (unique data) 5342739088 2957847871 Ie, I have ~1.3TB of data stored in total but I am only being charged ($0.0239 US per day) for what amounts to ~2.75GB after deduplication and compression. Mind you, I have not compared tarsnap's prices to…
1.3 TB deduplicating & compressing down to 2.75 GB seems way too good to be true. Is there something weird about your data that leads to this level of compression?