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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 gara
by derekp7 8y ago
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 Add in some monitoring so you can get a phone alert if any of the synced copies are more than a few days out of date, and you are almost golden.
- justwalt 8y agoThat's a really cool solution.
- jordache 8y agohow do you power the usb drive whilst it's syncing in your car, while parked in the garage? What if the drive gets stolen?
- catmanjan 8y agoHe said it syncs when he pulls in so presumably a 12v power supply
- derekp7 8y agoIt 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).
- jrowley 8y agoWow what a clever/simple elegant solution. I was wondering how you set it up so it wouldn't drain your battery. Excellent work!
- bronco21016 8y agoDo you ever worry about the Li-Ion pack having issues in the hot car?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI've never specifically used a Li-Ion pack in my car PC setup, storing it in the heat would worry me a bit, but surprisingly, operational temps in a car aren't bad: If he's using it after he drives it, the car has likely been cooled or heated for driver comfort, and it'll take time after he parks for the temperature in the car to return to "outdoor" levels.
- bronco21016 8y agoMy bigger concern is just storing it. It sounds like he’s using just a regular powerbank type battery which is li-ion. Letting it sit in a parking lot for a day in the summer then turning it on probably isn’t a very good thermal situation. I wonder if some sort of sealed lead acid might be better. Far more inconvenient for power management though as some sort of circuit would have to be created.
- gtirloni 8y agoDoes the RaspberryPi have enough CPU for disk encryption?
- netsharc 8y agoNot OP, it'd be neat if it just uses FTP (or rsync) to transmit data which is already encrypted from the uploading-side...
- stedaniels 8y agoWith encrypted upload, you usually get a destination authentication thrown in for free, i.e. you're uploading to the right server :-)
- bhauer 8y agoIt doesn't need to, assuming you're using something like rclone [1], where the encryption is done on the "client," which in this case would be the GP's home server. The client does the encryption, treating the disk attached to the Raspberry Pi as an untrusted third-party disk. As long as you keep the decryption key safe (e.g., on a USB stick stored off-site), you should be good to go in the event that you need to pull data and decrypt it. [1] https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
- nothrabannosir 8y agoRaspberryPis can emulate Mario Kart on an N64, run Minecraft on Linux and even Mathematica at decent speeds; I'm willing to bet big bucks they can handle symmetric key encryption (which does not require much power). If a crappy NAS can run disk encryption, so can a raspberry pi. They're deceivingly potent.
- b1r6 8y agoThis is brilliant! I think I'll hack something together for this soon...
- mikeash 8y agoThat’s on-site way too often for my tastes. If your house burns down while your car is in the garage, there’s a good chance you’ll lose the backup too. Adding a computer in your office fixes that, but why not just send your backups to it over the internet instead of using this ad-box vehicular transport protocol?
- tiernano 8y agoNever underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes travelling down the highway...
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoInitial seeding of your offsite backup over the Internet would be a pain, but most people's valuable data change rate isn't high enough to significantly tax modern broadband connections. I sync a few gigs of data a week and I never even notice it happen.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- clanrebornyes 8y agoI use syncthing for syncing when my raspberry pi joins a specific BSSID, sync starts. It's susceptible to macspoofing but I hope my Pi won't join a spoofed network.
- okramcivokram 8y agoEven if it does, isn't Syncthing traffic encrypted. Also, 'they' would need to spoof your other syncthing node for the first one to start syncing with it, and if they have that much info, you've already lost.
- atoav 8y agoI use syncthing to sync (mostly important text stuff) between my two machines and my android phone. Once every day one of the machines uploads the changes via duplicati.
- Jaruzel 8y agoWhen I had my new 'Man Shed' (It's a large workshop really[1]) built at the end of my garden, I ensured I could extend my network to it. I have an old NAS with a couple of large drives in it, and I have scheduled backups that write to it from the main file server in the house. It's not perfect, but it's way better than not having any offsite backups at all. I have a deep distrust of Cloud storage services so for me I think this setup is the best solution I'm going to get. --- [1] I'm in the UK, so our typical 'sheds' are absolutely tiny - this one is not.
- dorfsmay 8y agoDistrust in cloud storage in which way? What are yafraid will happen. Which data are you afraid is going to end up in whose hands? The data I really care about is encrypted right on my laptop,and I backup that encrypted data.
- mattowen_uk 8y agoIt no so much that, but more of a control aspect. Once my backups are on someone-elses-computer I've lost control of them, and knowing my luck the day I need them will be the day the cloud provider has an outage, or even worse, goes offline.
- dorfsmay 8y agoThere is no way the big cloud providers, AWS, GCP, Azure go offline without a notice period (even medium size one like DO). Use a solution that you can easily switch from one provider to another one, switch when there is any warning that the one you use might be in trouble. In the same line, make sure people in your family (or technically savvy friends) understand your system, are able to switch and know to pay the could provider bills if you're not around - unless it is ok for your entire storage to disappear when you die of course.
- verytrivial 8y agoHa! That sounds like such a neat idea that I'm now skeptical that it is indeed just an idea! Do you have a write up somewhere? That sounds really cool.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vonseel 8y agoHow does this not kill your car battery?