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I Nearly Lost All of My Data

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Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#81

Post by bronco21016 »

derekp7 wrote: post #31
jordache wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you power the usb drive whilst it's syncing in your car, while parked in the garage? What if the drive gets stolen?

It is hooked up to a USB battery pack, which in turn is plugged into the accessory port on the car. The hard drive powers down after the data transfer is finished. All data is encrypted before sending to it. If it gets stolen, well it is only one of the copies of the data (however it lives hidden under the dash, and is small enough that it looks like a piece of car equipment).

Do you ever worry about the Li-Ion pack having issues in the hot car?

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#82

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Havoc wrote: post #15

After thinking about this kind of data apocalypse for a bit I realised that the portion of my data that is mission critical is actually really small. Throwing it on multiple clouds with version history isn't an issue. (I'd recommend an O365 sub + duplicati...in theory you can push like 5TB to MS cloud).

Yes! The most important data I have fits inside 10MB, and even the "I'd like to keep this" stuff isn't huge.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#84

Post by stordoff »

_bxg1 wrote: post #74

I just don't understand rolling your own backup drives in 2018 unless you're up to something nefarious. I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox, and the immediate backup means I don't have to mess with slow, periodic all-at-once backups.

> I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox

This is still putting all of your eggs in one basket. What happens if I lose access to my account?

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#85

Post by walterbell »

1kGarand wrote: post #62

I see some terrible backup strategies here. 1. Backups should not be on a single drive. 2. Backups without checksums will result in corruption. 3. Offsite is a must. 4. Unencrypted off site backup means someone already copied your data. 5. Encrypted offsite backups should have forward secrecy. So different keys for each file and keys file gets backed up encrypted. My backup strategy: File server runs zfs raidz with D…

> Encrypted offsite backups should have forward secrecy. So different keys for each file and keys file gets backed up encrypted.

Any references on PFS for backups? Was there no existing OSS backup solution that implements PFS?

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#86

Post by sliken »

shakna wrote: post #8

Sounds like a UPS with the standard protections is going to be somewhere in your future... Just not somewhere a cleaning lady can touch it.

Most UPSs don't provide much more protection than a power strip. They have a cheap "surge" protector, if you look it's often just running the tower through a ferrite ring.

Generally the input it directly connected to the output, through the ferrite ring. Only in cases of a power outage does a relay trigger and switch to the batteries. But that doesn't prevent a surge from going through the UPS.

You can hear the relay trigger when you disconnect it from the wall power, the latency is high enough to allow plenty of damage.

There do exist UPSs without this problem, but they are more expensive, heavier, generate more heat, and consume more power. Look for double conversion UPSs that in the normal state go from AC -> DC -> AC.

Kinda weird that while computers are 100% DC, they are fed with 100% AC. I was pleasantly surprised that pretty much all ham radio stuff is DC fed. MUCH easier to do UPSs, solar, wind, or have multiple pieces of equipment share the same power supply. Imagine racks with a big power supply on top (and getting rid of all the AC -> DC conversion heat). I've actually seen these, but they were unfortunately cost prohibitive.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#87

Post by chiph »

gtirloni wrote: post #24
derekp7 wrote: post #13

The best solution I found as an alternative to an off-site copy is to set up a USB drive and something like a Raspberry Pi in my car. When I pull into the garage, the house server senses it and syncs new data to it. This can be supplemented further by having it auto sync to a computer in your office whenever you pull into work. Add in some monitoring so you can get a phone alert if any of the synced copies are more t…

Does the RaspberryPi have enough CPU for disk encryption?

I've run Truecrypt on mine, and it works with small drives - 100gb or so. But it gets super hot, even with a heatsink. I wouldn't rely on it.

This was so I could use it to back up my Synology box to a set of external USB drives and retire the older Mac Mini I had been using. I'm still using the Mini...

In the case of the author, +1 for doing backups, but -1 for not establishing a chain of off-site copies (a safety deposit box at your bank, a relatives house that's some distance away, etc)

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#88

Post by _bxg1 »

detaro wrote: post #76
_bxg1 wrote: post #74

I just don't understand rolling your own backup drives in 2018 unless you're up to something nefarious. I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox, and the immediate backup means I don't have to mess with slow, periodic all-at-once backups.

And I just don't understand how people can trust just a single online service with their backups. They can be part of a plan, e.g. to quickly get data off-site, but I wouldn't trust a single one enough (case in point: Dropbox actually has managed to loose data in the past, + the occasional security failure)

The risk of distributed data centers losing my stuff is exponentially less than that of situations like the one in this very article. And while a security professional might be able to set up better security on a home server than what cloud storage providers offer, I am not a security professional, and even if I were I'd probably still want to outsource that to other professionals and not deal with it.

If you build this kind of thing because you enjoy it, more power to you. But I see no valid argument for its practicality.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#89

Post by _bxg1 »

stordoff wrote: post #84
_bxg1 wrote: post #74

I just don't understand rolling your own backup drives in 2018 unless you're up to something nefarious. I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox, and the immediate backup means I don't have to mess with slow, periodic all-at-once backups.

> I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox This is still putting all of your eggs in one basket. What happens if I lose access to my account?

You could say the same of the encryption key for your local drive. Or your bitcoin password. Any secure system has a baseline key that you can't afford to lose. Just make sure you don't.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#90

Post by KingMachiavelli »

_bxg1 wrote: post #74

I just don't understand rolling your own backup drives in 2018 unless you're up to something nefarious. I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox, and the immediate backup means I don't have to mess with slow, periodic all-at-once backups.

It's much cheaper to build your own than to use cloud storage esecially a secondary storage service like Dropbox. Even blackblaze B2 is $60/TB/year vs you can buy an 8TB HDD on Ebay for ~$200 and if the drive lasts 5 years that works out to be $5/TB/year and adding one or two redudent drives is still much cheaper.
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