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How I store my files

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Re: How I store my files

#91

Post by bachmeier »

KronisLV wrote: post #89
helmholtz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How common an occurence is that? How often is an unimportant, middle class person's data at risk, really? 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 be…

> 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.

That's not the same as OneDrive - the entire budget of those organizations is probably a rounding error compared with Microsoft or Google's security spending. It was once reported that Microsoft spends over $1 billion a year on security.[1]

[1] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-microsoft-spends-ov...

> In contrast, my current self-hosted software accounts have been compromised 0 times in the past 4 years.

How would you know?

Re: How I store my files

#92

Post by reaperducer »

codesections wrote: post #33
beervirus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Check with your bank. If you have enough accounts, or the right kind of accounts, they may give you one for free.

It's usually listed included in the long list of benefits that almost nobody ever reads.

Each year I get a bill from a major American bank in the amount of $0 for a safe deposit box I don't use because I have a certain amount of money in one account.

Re: How I store my files

#93

Post by gurchik »

kumarsw wrote: post #77

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…

> 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 self host a Nextcloud server and I run duplicity each night to back this up to an offsite location. I use incremental backups because I have a data cap. From there each month I duplicate the most recent versions of the Duplicity directory onto a cold hard drive at the same location.

I was surprised to see a couple people in this thread say to not rely on Duplicity for this. What could I be doing better?

Re: How I store my files

#94

Post by progval »

Gurdt wrote: post #12

Can someone point me to the flaws of my method? I simply use Google Drive. Me and my partner have multiple devices (tablet, iPhone, Android phone, multiple Mac and Windows laptops) and we just sync folders to our desktop. We just store everything we don't want to lose in Drive. We share folders we both need. Photo's we take on our phones are automagically backed up in the cloud, music and movies are streamed. My hous…

In addition to what others noted, you are vulnerable to ransomware, as someone in control of your computer can delete everything.

Re: How I store my files

#95

Post by Johnny555 »

I do pretty much what he does, but use rsync - I rsync up my laptop twice daily to a ZFS fileserver, that fileserver is backed up to the cloud and rsync'ed to a networked hard drive located on the opposite side of the house from the fileserver. Every once in a while I swap out that hard drive with another one, so I have 2 copies of most of the data, with the most up to date data in the cloud.

I used to use rsync to make incremental backups, but now I count on the cloud backup to keep versions.

I use encfs to encrypt the backups (despite its security weaknesses, it's "good enough" to keep my data safe if a hard drive is lost/stolen).

I don't worry about this:

Not only does encryption during data recovery make everything much more difficult, but should you pass away, your family members might not have the skills required to access the data.

If I die, the only thing my family will care about is the pictures that are on a google photo album, no one is going to care about the RAW source images on the hard drive, no one is going to want to look at the mail archive from my job 10 years ago. My wife is certainly not going to maintain a DLNA server to watch videos that I ripped from disks, she's just going to load the original blu-ray/DVD. And not even I ever play any of the CD's that I spent hours ripping to MP3's - I just stream music from Spotify.

Re: How I store my files

#96

Post by yosito »

I'm a digital nomad, and I decided I wanted to store all of my data as securely as possible without relying on Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple. Here's my setup, in case anyone finds it useful.

I store all of my data in Nextcloud hosted on a VPS. It's virtually impossible to guarantee the security of data on a running VPS, so my sensitive data is also encrypted with Cryptomator, so I don't have to trust my VPS host (but I also chose my VPS host carefully with data privacy and security as my main criteria). My host makes daily backups of the VPS off-site, and I also backup my Nextcloud data directory daily to Tardigrade/Storj DCS via their s3 API using Restic. An advantage of Storj DCS is that it's geographically distributed, so you're insulated from natural disasters. I also sync all of my Nextcloud data to both of my laptops, and use Restic to make another backup snapshot on an external USB SSD once a month. My Docker configs for Nextcloud are stored on GitHub, but I wouldn't have trouble recreating them if I somehow lost them.

For my own personal risk model, I think my sensitive data is pretty well protected from third parties, and I think all of my data is reliably backed up accounting for multiple types of failure. My biggest vulnerability is probably my password manager, where all of my encryption keys and passwords are stored.

If anyone has any suggestions on how I can improve my setup, or any potential problems you see, I'd love it if you share!

Re: How I store my files

#97

Post by cogman10 »

crazygringo wrote: post #80
cogman10 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are different risks. Yes, at home storage is more at risk for a targeted attack. However, cloud storage is more at risk for a general attack. It's dead simple for a waiter to steal your CC#. Yet that's likely not going to happen as they'd lose their job and run major risks at getting caught by the police. On the flip side, a big company like target, even though they have a wealth of experts hired to prevent it,…

I'd say home storage is more at risk even for a general attack if you're using retail hardware with default configurations, like a NAS -- it's easy to scan the entire internet for vulnerabilities. Plus it tends to be vulnerable even to non-traditional attacks like Bitcoin ransoms. Whereas cloud storage is custom and patched and up-to-date and monitored... your consumer hardware mostly isn't any of those. And there's…

Nah, those general attacks require 2 steps. Getting past the router and finding the NAS.

Sure, you could pull off both exploits, but it's not really likely.

The most vulnerable to those attacks likely aren't operating NAS's in the first place. Very few people are (which decreases the likelihood of attack). I'd imagine most of us on HN are regularly patching all of our home hardware. That makes us far less likely to be susceptible to those sorts of general attacks.

If an attacker is looking for something juicy and general, they are far more likely to try and pull off a general attack against someone's laptop or phone. That's where the pool of users is much more broad.

Re: How I store my files

#98

Post by newscracker »

crazygringo wrote: post #74
TchoBeer wrote: post #71

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.

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…

> 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.

That maybe so, but they won't accept any liability for losing your data either. In the end, we're left to fend for ourselves.

Re: How I store my files

#99

Post by synergy20 »

What's the best way to encrypt files, GunPG, openssl, ccrypt, some AES256 command line utility, or some backup can do it automatically? I do want to encrypt part of my backup before upload them to the cloud.

Re: How I store my files

#100

Post by newscracker »

BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote: post #54
rsync wrote: post #50

"While I know of some really good cloud providers, such as rsync.net and Tarsnap, I recommend that you never trust cloud providers blindly." This is very good advice. That being said, humans need heuristics and shortcuts to aid in decision-making. I hope the fact that rsync.net has been doing this work since 2001 is helpful in that regard. ... "There exist some really cool open source backup solutions such as Borg, R…

> That being said, humans need heuristics and shortcuts to aid in decision-making. I hope the fact that rsync.net has been doing this work since 2001 is helpful in that regard. This is implied by the 'blindly' part. Searching "cloud storage provider", seeing rsync.net listed and picking it with a thrown dart would be blind. A quick search to see that it's been around for a while and doesn't have any crazy horror stor…

In case you didn't notice or realize or recognize, GP is the founder of rsync.net (I'm not saying this to assign any ulterior motive for that comment).
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