81–90 of 144 posts
I'll agree with the author partly on software such as rustic/duplicacy - they are not a good solution for long-term archiving, nor are they marketed as such. I keep a network share that I mirror the home folder on my computers to daily, but I take periodic snapshots of the share with duplicacy and copy the snapshots to Backblaze B2. The comments seem to be conflating Google Drive type cloud storage with more general…
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For small stuff like this, print it out and put it in a safe deposit box.
This would be the only reason I'd need to pay for a safe deposit box. It might be worth it, just for that, but I haven't made that leap yet.
I have a Synology NAS. All cloud files sync to it (Dropbox and Gdrive, the latter using "real" files, not just their .gdoc format), all backed up nightly to Synology C2 in the cloud, encrypted. Photos, which are in the "absolutely irreplaceable" category: all of the above but also have Mylio running so have external drives and 2x desktops with this data on them. Feels pretty safe, I think...?
Having copies in at least 2 physical locations is important, because RAID/on-site backups won't help you if there's a fire/flood/theft that destroys everything. Back in school I used to have 2 Synology NAS, one in my dorm, one in my office, each running two drives with RAID 1. I had a gigabit link between my dorm and office (in 2008-2014!) thanks to MIT's awesome network. Now I live in Silicon Valley where even in 20…
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Alternatively, "sure all my sensitive data was stolen and leaked, but at least I made it to Italy" said no one ever.
How common an occurence is that? How often is an unimportant, middle class person's data at risk, really? Enough that you'd want to spin up your ZFS storage? Hypothetically, let's say I had my entire life on Google. I have a unique password for it, backed up by 2FA, without the SMS/Authenticator fallback. What's the long term consequence? Google knows everything about me? They already do anyway. Someone can steal my…
I think it is safe to assume that Google does some sort of data mining on the data you upload. If that bothers you, self hosting everything isn't your only option -- you can also encrypt everything before uploading to your Drive. Duplicity is one such example that I use.
Despite this, I still don't rely on Google Drive, not for privacy reasons but because of Google's history of disabling people's access. If your Google account is banned at no fault of your own, there is a possibility you could lose all access to those files. Even if you did nothing wrong, you will never in a million years get a human to review your case.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-afte...
I have had this happen to me, but thankfully it didn't affect anything other than Google Pay. I used it twice for a family member to reimburse me grocery money and Google decided that they were ceasing to do business with me anymore, they would mail me a check, and they told me to not contact them again.
So, everything I have on Google Drive is synchronized to another paid storage service (mostly photos since I don't believe Google Photos has a very good open source self hosted alternative).
I feel like I have a fairly solid backup system for all of my important files. They are protected against elementary disasters and cyber attacks alike. However the only thing I struggle with are my phone photos. I recently caved in and started using iCloud Photos due to the convenience of having all my phone photos alwas available, searchable and tagged, even if the library size exceeds my phone‘s capacity. Does anyo…
I spent extensive time evaluating this problem, and tried a whole bunch of different things: Nextcloud, Resilio, iCloud, etc etc etc. Honestly? Just using Google Photos is probably the best bet for most folks, whether you’re on iOS or something else. I personally picked OneDrive for my use case since it is both more performant for large data sync and 6 TB + Office 365 for a family plan beat out the alternatives on pr…
Android doesn't know it, but their killer app is Syncthing.
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Alternatively, "sure all my sensitive data was stolen and leaked, but at least I made it to Italy" said no one ever.
I trust major cloud providers like Google or Microsoft to protect my data far more than I'd ever trust a bunch of retail hardware I plugged together and configured myself. They have entire gigantic teams of employees dedicated to security and privacy and protection from threats. I couldn't replicate that even if I wanted to. If someone wants to steal and leak your sensitive data, they'll have a much easier time getti…
Yeah but what if Google suddenly decides you're racist or have the wrong political views? Boom, data terminated, locked out, oopsie!
> Everything can look really nice "on paper" but you don't know what goes on behind the scenes. I have worked with a lot of different people and I have seen too much crazy shit to fully trust anyone with my important data. A cloud provider may have the best of intentions, but sometimes all it takes is a single grumpy employee or even a minor mistake to do a lot of damage. OneDrive and Google Drive are both pretty che…
Alternatively, "sure all my sensitive data was stolen and leaked, but at least I made it to Italy" said no one ever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, "sure all my sensitive data was stolen and leaked, but at least I made it to Italy" said no one ever.
How common an occurence is that? How often is an unimportant, middle class person's data at risk, really? Enough that you'd want to spin up your ZFS storage? Hypothetically, let's say I had my entire life on Google. I have a unique password for it, backed up by 2FA, without the SMS/Authenticator fallback. What's the long term consequence? Google knows everything about me? They already do anyway. Someone can steal my…
My online accounts have been compromised 16 times in the past 5 years, according to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ including sites like Android Forums and Linux Mint Forums. There are plenty of other better known platforms on there, too, so it's safe to assume that most of the data on said sites would have also been accessible to the attackers.
In contrast, my current self-hosted software accounts have been compromised 0 times in the past 4 years. Maybe 1 time, if you count a throwaway node's Docker socket being exposed to the network accidentally and a crypto miner getting launched on it.
Why is that? Because although many of the online platforms have dedicated security specialists (hopefully) and manage to fight off thousands (or more) attacks daily, all it takes is one good attack to compromise thousands (or more) users and their data in one large batch. Furthermore, those are far more of an interesting target to attackers, possibly due to financial incentives.
Unless easily automatable (like the aforementioned Docker crypto attack), attacking self-hosted software is far less lucrative. It would probably be far easier to hack John Doe's Nextcloud or ownCloud instance, yet the financial gain from that would likely be far lower than stealing a bunch of different users' data on a lesser known and less secure cloud platform of some sort, and selling it or doing something else.
To that end, i see two strategies for protecting one's data:
A) make your defenses good enough to be able to stand up to targeted attacks, which is truly feasible in large orgs and cloud platforms
B) make yourself a less lucrative target, by self-hosting some software and making hacking you sufficiently hard, so that most automated attacks will fail (use key pairs for SSH, use fail2ban, SSL/TLS with something like Let's Encrypt, use Docker Networks if you need Docker so that nothing apart from 80/443 of your ingress is actually exposed to the outside / or just use your firewall for the services that are not containerized, though then you also need to think more about user permissions etc.)
As for your Google question, i cannot say. They have a pretty decent security track record, however there have been plenty of breaches in large orgs: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-big...
> These tools work really great, until they don't! Huh? Whats the problem? How is ZFS any different because its lower level? > ZFS without ECC memory is no worse than any other file system without ECC memory. You really do need ECC memory unless you are ok with your pool becoming corrupt every 6 months or so. Im just saying this from my experience of running a ZFS server without ECC, the data wasn't critical so I lef…
> One could argue that ZFS is complex as well, but that is on the filesystem level, a level on which you cannot avoid complexity no matter what you do.