2 ms·

I almost went with Backblaze, but there does not appear to be a way to restore an encrypted backup without having the decryption take place on their servers [1]

by causi 5y ago

I almost went with Backblaze, but there does not appear to be a way to restore an encrypted backup without having the decryption take place on their servers [1]: So encrypt it yourself before they encrypt it for storage.

tzs 5y ago
I may have been unclear. I'm talking about Backblaze's personal backup product/service, not their generic cloud storage service (B2). With the former you install some of their software on your computer. That software reads your files, encrypts them with the key Backblaze generated for you, and stores them on their servers. The Backblaze software sees the same data that applications on your computer see. It is hard to see a reasonable way to impose your own encryption there in a way that would make Backblaze's software see the encrypted data. If you are using a whole disk encryption system or whole partition encryption system, applications on your computer (including Backblaze's) see unencrypted data. You could do file level encryption yourself with GPG or age or similar, but that would generally be in enormous pain in the ass because every time you wanted to use a file you'd need to decrypt it and if you modified it re-encrypt it. (And when you decrypt a file to use it you'd have to be careful that an incremental backup doesn't happen while you have the file decrypted). I suppose you could get a drive specifically for local backup, use local backup software to maintain an encrypted backup on that drive, and use Backblaze's personal backup service to back up just your backup drive.
- causi 5y ago
  Personally I've never had an issue just using encrypted containers but I'd be interested in a solution that behaved like Windows EFS while letting you define a blacklist of programs that aren't allowed to see the decrypted file content.

2 ms·

I almost went with Backblaze, but there does not appear to be a way to restore an encrypted backup without having the decryption take place on their servers [1]

by causi 5y ago

tzs 5y ago
I may have been unclear. I'm talking about Backblaze's personal backup product/service, not their generic cloud storage service (B2). With the former you install some of their software on your computer. That software reads your files, encrypts them with the key Backblaze generated for you, and stores them on their servers. The Backblaze software sees the same data that applications on your computer see. It is hard to see a reasonable way to impose your own encryption there in a way that would make Backblaze's software see the encrypted data. If you are using a whole disk encryption system or whole partition encryption system, applications on your computer (including Backblaze's) see unencrypted data. You could do file level encryption yourself with GPG or age or similar, but that would generally be in enormous pain in the ass because every time you wanted to use a file you'd need to decrypt it and if you modified it re-encrypt it. (And when you decrypt a file to use it you'd have to be careful that an incremental backup doesn't happen while you have the file decrypted). I suppose you could get a drive specifically for local backup, use local backup software to maintain an encrypted backup on that drive, and use Backblaze's personal backup service to back up just your backup drive.
- causi 5y ago
  Personally I've never had an issue just using encrypted containers but I'd be interested in a solution that behaved like Windows EFS while letting you define a blacklist of programs that aren't allowed to see the decrypted file content.