4 ms·

Two (sets of) questions. 1. What do you do if your house burns down? What happens to the documents you care about most? Do you keep a USB drive in a safety dep

Two (sets of) questions. 1. What do you do if your house burns down? What happens to the documents you care about most? Do you keep a USB drive in a safety deposit box and retrieve it regularly? (I have a local USB backup, and I have a remote backup through the cloud.) 2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment?

meaty 14y ago
What I do: 1. fire safe. 200kg one. Usb stick in it, although I'm considering switching to DLT. USB stick in my bag. Both encrypted with truecrypt at moment. 2. Do without it. Got a moleskin with everything useful in it. note: I use a film camera and have cds so my media load is quite low. Negatives live in the fire safe and I have a list of cds in a text file so will just buy them again. I also bin emails. My data volume is approximately 800mb. Not much.
mbell 14y ago
> 1. What do you do if your house burns down? I backup important stuff encrypted to S3 with a script. > 2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment? I use pfSense [0] as a router / security appliance running on a Atom based micro ATX board with a 4 ethernet ports. I connect remotely using OpenVPN terminated at the pfSense box and use Viscosity [2] on the client side. File storage is on a FreeNAS [1] server. Very easy to setup if you have basic networking knowledge. The only downside is that there is no built in support for OpenVPN in iOS. There is an app that handles it if your device is jailbroken. [0] http://www.pfsense.org/ http://www.pfsense.org/ [1] http://www.freenas.org/ http://www.freenas.org/ [2] http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/ http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/
- ebiester 14y ago
  I was making a point that you're using the cloud if you're doing remote backup, with point 1.
npsimons 14y ago
Do you keep a USB drive in a safety deposit box and retrieve it regularly? Yes. Why don't you? It's not that hard, and a hell of a lot more reliable and secure than cloud storage. 2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment? Blah, blah, blah. This isn't the 90s, you know. We do have things like Apache/Nginx with self signed SSL certs these days (not to mention SSH, rsync, VPNs, etc, etc), and it's not that hard to setup (used to be a right of passage for geeks; these days it's considered entrance exam to the equivalent of geek pre-school). Things are also getting better everyday with projects for "personal clouds" (aka, your own file server with a web interface).
- ebiester 14y ago
  1) I'm currently in Istanbul, Turkey, and Turkish is still a work in progress, so getting offsite storage would be a bit of a challenge. When I am back in the states, I find that the best way to forget to backup is to place said backup miles away. For the last decade, my existence has been a bit nomadic, and setting up a safety deposit box has never been in my top to-do list.. And I did have a "local cloud" in the 90s. :) I find it a positive development that I don't have to do it today. I work enough that I would rather trade money for babysitting a box, checking for security updates, fighting incompatibilities with the scripts when an interface changes, and the other administrivia minutia. I mean, for a personal uses, it probably won't come to haunt you that you're using an old piece of software with a security bug. But at this point, I have no problem paying for the privilege of thinking about other things.

meaty 14y ago

What I do: 1. fire safe. 200kg one. Usb stick in it, although I'm considering switching to DLT. USB stick in my bag. Both encrypted with truecrypt at moment. 2. Do without it. Got a moleskin with everything useful in it. note: I use a film camera and have cds so my media load is quite low. Negatives live in the fire safe and I have a list of cds in a text file so will just buy them again. I also bin emails. My data volume is approximately 800mb. Not much.

mbell 14y ago

> 1. What do you do if your house burns down? I backup important stuff encrypted to S3 with a script. > 2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment? I use pfSense [0] as a router / security appliance running on a Atom based micro ATX board with a 4 ethernet ports. I connect remotely using OpenVPN terminated at the pfSense box and use Viscosity [2] on the client side. File storage is on a FreeNAS [1] server. Very easy to setup if you have basic networking knowledge. The only downside is that there is no built in support for OpenVPN in iOS. There is an app that handles it if your device is jailbroken. [0] http://www.pfsense.org/ http://www.pfsense.org/ [1] http://www.freenas.org/ http://www.freenas.org/ [2] http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/ http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/

ebiester 14y ago
I was making a point that you're using the cloud if you're doing remote backup, with point 1.

npsimons 14y ago

Do you keep a USB drive in a safety deposit box and retrieve it regularly? Yes. Why don't you? It's not that hard, and a hell of a lot more reliable and secure than cloud storage. 2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment? Blah, blah, blah. This isn't the 90s, you know. We do have things like Apache/Nginx with self signed SSL certs these days (not to mention SSH, rsync, VPNs, etc, etc), and it's not that hard to setup (used to be a right of passage for geeks; these days it's considered entrance exam to the equivalent of geek pre-school). Things are also getting better everyday with projects for "personal clouds" (aka, your own file server with a web interface).

ebiester 14y ago
1) I'm currently in Istanbul, Turkey, and Turkish is still a work in progress, so getting offsite storage would be a bit of a challenge. When I am back in the states, I find that the best way to forget to backup is to place said backup miles away. For the last decade, my existence has been a bit nomadic, and setting up a safety deposit box has never been in my top to-do list.. And I did have a "local cloud" in the 90s. :) I find it a positive development that I don't have to do it today. I work enough that I would rather trade money for babysitting a box, checking for security updates, fighting incompatibilities with the scripts when an interface changes, and the other administrivia minutia. I mean, for a personal uses, it probably won't come to haunt you that you're using an old piece of software with a security bug. But at this point, I have no problem paying for the privilege of thinking about other things.