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I just don't understand rolling your own backup drives in 2018 unless you're up to something nefarious. I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by

by _bxg1 8y ago

I just don't understand rolling your own backup drives in 2018 unless you're up to something nefarious. I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox, and the immediate backup means I don't have to mess with slow, periodic all-at-once backups.

detaro 8y ago
And I just don't understand how people can trust just a single online service with their backups. They can be part of a plan, e.g. to quickly get data off-site, but I wouldn't trust a single one enough (case in point: Dropbox actually has managed to loose data in the past, + the occasional security failure)
- _bxg1 8y ago
  The risk of distributed data centers losing my stuff is exponentially less than that of situations like the one in this very article. And while a security professional might be able to set up better security on a home server than what cloud storage providers offer, I am not a security professional, and even if I were I'd probably still want to outsource that to other professionals and not deal with it. If you build this kind of thing because you enjoy it, more power to you. But I see no valid argument for its practicality.
stordoff 8y ago
> I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox This is still putting all of your eggs in one basket. What happens if I lose access to my account?
- _bxg1 8y ago
  You could say the same of the encryption key for your local drive. Or your bitcoin password. Any secure system has a baseline key that you can't afford to lose. Just make sure you don't.
- zepolen 8y ago
  It's two baskets - dropbox and local.
KingMachiavelli 8y ago
It's much cheaper to build your own than to use cloud storage esecially a secondary storage service like Dropbox. Even blackblaze B2 is $60/TB/year vs you can buy an 8TB HDD on Ebay for ~$200 and if the drive lasts 5 years that works out to be $5/TB/year and adding one or two redudent drives is still much cheaper.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  I guess that's a legitimate reason, though the tradeoff still doesn't seem worth it unless you have massive amounts of data
- cyphar 8y ago
  How do you deal with the off-site problem? That's why most people use cloud services -- as an off-site backup that they don't need to manage themselves. Yeah, you could just put everything on an 8TB hard-drive from eBay (not sure that's a great idea for important data) and stick it on a shelf -- but the chance that drive will be alive and not have bit-rotted by the time you need the data is smaller than most people would be comfortable with.
syshum 8y ago
3-2-1 Backup should always be in your mind. 3 Copies 2 different Media (or vendors) 1 Offsite / Offline There are all kinds of things I could think of that may cause problems with your dropbox plans but what would keep me up at night is all the ways I could not think of never trust a single vendor, a single NAS, a single anything... NEVER
jackvalentine 8y ago
It was several years ago and I can't find the link now, but Dropbox has previously had a bug that deleted the data in the account and then synced the deleted change back to all the client PCs. It was unrecoverable.

by _bxg1 8y ago

detaro 8y ago

And I just don't understand how people can trust just a single online service with their backups. They can be part of a plan, e.g. to quickly get data off-site, but I wouldn't trust a single one enough (case in point: Dropbox actually has managed to loose data in the past, + the occasional security failure)

_bxg1 8y ago
The risk of distributed data centers losing my stuff is exponentially less than that of situations like the one in this very article. And while a security professional might be able to set up better security on a home server than what cloud storage providers offer, I am not a security professional, and even if I were I'd probably still want to outsource that to other professionals and not deal with it. If you build this kind of thing because you enjoy it, more power to you. But I see no valid argument for its practicality.

stordoff 8y ago

> I rest peacefully knowing my data will never be lost by Dropbox This is still putting all of your eggs in one basket. What happens if I lose access to my account?

_bxg1 8y ago
You could say the same of the encryption key for your local drive. Or your bitcoin password. Any secure system has a baseline key that you can't afford to lose. Just make sure you don't.
zepolen 8y ago
It's two baskets - dropbox and local.

KingMachiavelli 8y ago

It's much cheaper to build your own than to use cloud storage esecially a secondary storage service like Dropbox. Even blackblaze B2 is $60/TB/year vs you can buy an 8TB HDD on Ebay for ~$200 and if the drive lasts 5 years that works out to be $5/TB/year and adding one or two redudent drives is still much cheaper.

_bxg1 8y ago
I guess that's a legitimate reason, though the tradeoff still doesn't seem worth it unless you have massive amounts of data
cyphar 8y ago
How do you deal with the off-site problem? That's why most people use cloud services -- as an off-site backup that they don't need to manage themselves. Yeah, you could just put everything on an 8TB hard-drive from eBay (not sure that's a great idea for important data) and stick it on a shelf -- but the chance that drive will be alive and not have bit-rotted by the time you need the data is smaller than most people would be comfortable with.

syshum 8y ago

3-2-1 Backup should always be in your mind. 3 Copies 2 different Media (or vendors) 1 Offsite / Offline There are all kinds of things I could think of that may cause problems with your dropbox plans but what would keep me up at night is all the ways I could not think of never trust a single vendor, a single NAS, a single anything... NEVER

jackvalentine 8y ago

It was several years ago and I can't find the link now, but Dropbox has previously had a bug that deleted the data in the account and then synced the deleted change back to all the client PCs. It was unrecoverable.