How I store my files • Hacker News Board

Re: How I store my files

#101

Post by unilynx » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

jarenmf wrote: post #5

I use borg backup to sync all our files (from ~5 machines) to an old PC which synchronizes everything to the cloud. Borg has deduplication, compression, encryption, and saves several versions of the files which I think is crucial. Also all text-based data are on Git like software, papers, etc.

Is your PC synchronising the source files or the borg files to the cloud ?

Otherwise it's still a SPOF for your backups (the borg files might corrupt, and you might be syncing that corruption to the cloud)

Re: How I store my files

#103

Post by aborsy » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

yosito wrote: post #96

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 have heard of Cryptomator, but haven’t looked into its code.

Has anyone looked into cryptography in Cryptomator?

It’s a Java app, and uses Java Cryptography Extension JCE. But I found limited information about JCE.

It was audited, but audits don’t mention some important aspects.

Re: How I store my files

#104

Post by tbronchain » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

yosito wrote: post #96

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…

Wondering something, if you are using cryptomator and a VPS - so you don't own your data and use a higher level encryption - why not using the cloud storage services (i.e Dropbox, icloud etc.) ?

Re: How I store my files

#105

Post by buffalobuffalo » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

I use dropbox, and a rsync script to a portable hard drive around once a month. I travel a lot, so i keep hard drives at several different places, which i think spreads the risk fairly well.

The only reason I'm willing to sync my data to dropbox though is that it's all encrypted with cryfs. Works really well normally, although with an m1 chip it's been a bit of a pain.

Re: How I store my files

#106

Post by kumarsw » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

gurchik wrote: post #93

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 dr…

My understanding is that there are two issues. First, modern deduplicating backup software like borg/restic/duplicacy store data in a repository in unique chunks. This avoids the issue that incremental backup software like duplicity have where they can create long chains of incremental changes which is slow to restore and increases the likelihood of errors on restore. Second, both deduplicating and incremental backup solutions aren't suggested for long-term archiving as they chop your files into lots of little pieces and the chances of not being able to read the repositories 10 years down the road are high. For that reason it's good to have a local backup in a simple, standard format like tar/zip or just a folder. As an example, see criticism of the Perkeep software [1] which is marketed as long term storage, but uses chunking deduplication for no particularly good reason.

[1] https://perkeep.org

Re: How I store my files

#107

Post by Nzen » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

mongol wrote: post #13

Something tricky is how to bootstrap restoration of backup. If you have lost "everything", how do you get it back? For example, if you use borg to backup remotely via ssh, you will need ssh keys as well as a passphrase for the encrypted backup. Where do you store those to make sure you have them if your computer is gone? What I did was create a self-extracting restoration script, which embedded everything needed. Thi…

If 'everything' does not include my phone, I keep a copy of my password manager database file on it, including embedded ssh files.

Re: How I store my files

#108

Post by yepthatsreality » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

> 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.

Terrible advice regarding encryption. Really if you have important data that your family needs at the time of your death you should have a plan for that as well. Not avoid encryption because it’s “too hard”.

Re: How I store my files

#109

Post by KronisLV » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #91

KronisLV wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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] ht…

> That's not the same as OneDrive...

I somewhat agree. However, you could have said the same about Facebook, Equifax, Twitter, Yahoo, VK and others. And yet, they all got hacked.

Even Microsoft itself isn't immune: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/01/22/microsof...

> How would you know?

If my servers start mining crypto, I've been pwned by script kiddies. If my data becomes available online and is thus available on the previously mentioned site, I've been pwned by more sophisticated attackers. Whereas if we're thinking more along the lines of NSA or Mossad, they are already in my systems and I just have to hope they're in a good mood.

On that note, none of my self hosted mail server related accounts seem to have been leaked so far, or at least haven't been made publically available.

Apart from that, one can also set up alerts for every SSH login, should fail2ban fail for some reason. On app level it becomes harder, to the point where it's often not worth the effort to introduce alerting. Maybe just blanket ban IP ranges that you don't expect to use at ingress level.

Re: How I store my files

#110

Post by thom » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by installing Dropbox.