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Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

#21

Post by cperciva »

trinket wrote: post #16
shrughes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a user of tarsnap. I have no idea of whether it's fantastic. I can see a list of times when I've run ./tarsnap.sh, but I have no idea if it's really encrypting the backup, and I have no idea if it's making a backup in the first place. I mean, I haven't had any hard drive failures and I haven't inspected the client source code. (As far as I can tell, the product is great.) And I can't remember where offsite I've p…

Losing the keyfile is a real concern for me as well, and makes me prefer less secure options like Dropbox or Ubuntu One. What do others do about this?

What do others do about this?

I don't know what all tarsnap users are doing, but I've heard the following options on several occasions: 1. Give it to a friend. 2. Put it on a USB key. 3. Store it on a different computer. 4. Print it out (recent versions of tarsnap have printable key files).

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

#22

Post by shrughes »

cperciva wrote: post #19
shrughes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a user of tarsnap. I have no idea of whether it's fantastic. I can see a list of times when I've run ./tarsnap.sh, but I have no idea if it's really encrypting the backup, and I have no idea if it's making a backup in the first place. I mean, I haven't had any hard drive failures and I haven't inspected the client source code. (As far as I can tell, the product is great.) And I can't remember where offsite I've p…

I have no idea if it's really encrypting the backup Unless you look at source code, you'll never know if a backup service is encrypting your backups or not. At least with tarsnap you have the option of reading the source code to verify that tarsnap does what I say it does. :-) ... and I have no idea if it's making a backup in the first place. tarsnap --list-archives, tarsnap -t, and tarsnap -x are your friends. The u…

> Unless you look at source code, you'll never know if a backup service is encrypting your backups or not. At least with tarsnap you have the option of reading the source code to verify that tarsnap does what I say it does. :-)

You could reverse engineer the protocol that other products use. :_) And I'd rather just assume that somebody else has reviewed the source code.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

#24

Post by rarrrrrr »

I founded SpiderOak in 2006: Zero-knowledge encrypted offsite backup and sync.

It does intensive deduplication across your full data set, keeps historical versions and deleted files for as long as you like and supports all major platforms. You can use the GUI or cmdline/cron/launchd.

2GB free, $10 per 100 GBs up to 1.5 TB, but use the promo code "askhackernews" for a 25% discount, or get a 50% discount automatically with a .edu email address.

We have our own data centers and built a clustering file system specifically for archival storage (colder data), which is why our prices are way under companies that outsource to S3, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

#26

Post by rarrrrrr »

byoung2 wrote: post #4

Mozy Sad but true story: I worked for a company that backed up email by printing them. They finally upgraded after a year of pleading...to a hard drive in a safe-deposit box at a bank down the street. And this was 2008!

We (SpiderOak) had a customer who previously arranged their backups with rotating tarballs, encrypted and daily moved offsite. Trouble was, the crypto keys were only archived _within_ the backup.

Backup is a nuanced problem. There's a good case for outsourcing it to a 3rd party who has the motivation to do constant QA.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

#27

Post by moe »

If the command line doesn't scare you then http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ may be worth a look. It uses PGP and supports incremental backup to S3.

I'm personally a bit wary about the mass market backup providers like crashplan and such. Sure they all say their binary client will encrypt my data before sending it to them. Sure their GUIs are shiney and much easier than the sharp-edged OSS tools.

But when all my personal, backup-worthy data is at stake then I prefer to know exactly what's going on, even if it initially took a little more work to set it up...

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

#29

Post by Kadin »

byoung2 wrote: post #4

Mozy Sad but true story: I worked for a company that backed up email by printing them. They finally upgraded after a year of pleading...to a hard drive in a safe-deposit box at a bank down the street. And this was 2008!

> to a hard drive in a safe-deposit box at a bank down the street

What's the problem with that? It's probably better than 95% of small businesses out there. No, it doesn't offer geographic redundancy and it might not withstand a killer tidal wave or nuclear strike, but for many businesses that's a moot point: such a situation would destroy their business outright anyway, to the point where their computers would be the least concern.

If they swapped out the HD in the box frequently (on a daily basis) it's not the worst idea I've ever seen.

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