endless external HD shuffle – RAID 1, 5, or RAID unecessary?

[Steven Ruttenberg]

If you use ArqBackUp on the client side the cloud service only sees encrypted rubbish and you are the only person with the key. No one except maybe the NSA with a very big computer and a lot of time (like months) is going to read you files. Personally I would love them wasting their time decrypting my large format photos ... :-)

That is true. If it is encrypted like PGP, then the code is not breakable, at least in a 1000 lifetimes according to the military and the FBI and such who bitched a storm about it because of that, and that is the weak encryption algorithm. The only way they could get you is to intercept the key if it is emailed to you or to confiscate your computer or hack into it and get the key/s that way. I think what I would do is put the key into 1password and ditch the original key. The it is encrypted. I like that, an encryption of an encryption.

I may look up ArqBackUp. What is price? I have at least a couple of TB of images. Mostly crap and family, but also some keepers.

[angusparker]

That is true. If it is encrypted like PGP, then the code is not breakable, at least in a 1000 lifetimes according to the military and the FBI and such who bitched a storm about it because of that, and that is the weak encryption algorithm. The only way they could get you is to intercept the key if it is emailed to you or to confiscate your computer or hack into it and get the key/s that way. I think what I would do is put the key into 1password and ditch the original key. The it is encrypted. I like that, an encryption of an encryption.

I may look up ArqBackUp. What is price? I have at least a couple of TB of images. Mostly crap and family, but also some keepers.

https://www.arqbackup.com/ one time fee of $50. Great software and easy to use. You keep the encryption key so it's basically unbreakable. Got to protect our keepers!

[seezee]

I ditched ARQ because they claimed unlimited storage but then one day it stopped working. I wrote to customer service and got a weasely response, saying that I had exceeded the storage limits (when I payed for the service, they explicitly said there was no limit). Do not recommend.

I use Crashplan Pro instead. For a few bucks a month it's worth the peace of mind, and it has saved my bacon more than once. The UI could use some improvements, and restores are slow (but that's partially dependent on your ISP), but it's overall a good and reliable service.

[seezee]

Regarding privacy, your browsing habits give away more information than your backups are ever likely too. Hell, your posts on this forum give away more. That's like worrying about serum cholesterol from egg consumption but being an alcoholic. It's not the eggs gonna kill you.

[angusparker]

I ditched ARQ because they claimed unlimited storage but then one day it stopped working. I wrote to customer service and got a weasely response, saying that I had exceeded the storage limits (when I payed for the service, they explicitly said there was no limit). Do not recommend.

I use Crashplan Pro instead. For a few bucks a month it's worth the peace of mind, and it has saved my bacon more than once. The UI could use some improvements, and restores are slow (but that's partially dependent on your ISP), but it's overall a good and reliable service.

Arqbackup is not a cloud service but software that automates and encrypts your content to any of about twenty cloud service. I use Backblaze and OneDrive as my cloud services. It works with both.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[bieber]

I use a RAID array for my main work station, and sync my photo library between my desktop, laptop, and a couple of external hard drives (one of which is at my inlaws' house on the other side of the country and gets updated a couple times a year when we're over that way. I figure if a natural disaster takes out Florida and California at the same time, I've likely gone with it one way or another). For online backup I use Amazon Glacier. It's dirt cheap to upload and store, but if you ever need to retrieve your data it'll take a few hours and cost you a pretty penny. Given that it's my backup of last resort, I'm pretty happy with that gamble. With any luck I'll spend the rest of my life paying on the order of a dollar or two a month to Amazon for storage and never end up having to pay the couple hundred dollars it would cost me to retrieve it all.

wrt the security and privacy of these services, as someone who's spent their entire professional career so far as a software engineer I would say that I'm not particularly worried about it. As far as security goes, they all have top notch security teams, to the extent that your data is drastically more likely to be compromised by malware on your local machine than it is on one of Google or Amazon's servers. I'd be a little bit less comfortable with a smaller service provider, but even some random second-tier service is still going to have much better security practices than the average computer user. And for privacy, well, yes, there are probably employees who could access your data if they wanted to. Those mechanisms are also going to be very tightly monitored, and anyone who does access your data is probably going to have to explain themselves to an auditor in short order. At every company I've worked for so far, inappropriate access to user data is the one thing that will absolutely get you fired on the spot without warning. And even if there is some engineer running around peeping into peoples' AWS data over at Amazon, they have tens of thousands (millions?) of customers with an unimaginably huge amount of data stored. The odds that some random interloper would stumble upon any of your files are astronomically low, unless you happen to have an Amazon engineer with a personal grudge against you. And of course if you're really, really paranoid you can always just encrypt your files on your local machine before sending them to a cloud storage service, and at that point you're storing random bytes for all they know.

Another thing I'd like to suggest, for anyone who's somewhat comfortable with the command line, is using git annex to version and manage large files. It's a little bit of a learning curve (and, I think, probably easier to get working on a Mac or Linux box than Windows), but it's an absolute godsend for backups. With one command I can fully back up all or any subset of my photos to another hard drive or computer, or Glacier (plus a bunch of other cloud services if you're so inclined), with a careful record kept of which files are where and only transferring the ones that actually need to be transferred. It can also do neat things like letting you set a minimum number of locations for any given file to be present and stopping you if you try to delete a copy that would bring you below the minimum, but my library isn't really big enough at this point to worry about that (I will admit I'm compressing the crap out of my scans, my plates really aren't good enough to justify multi-hundred-meg tif files yet anyways).

[seezee]

Arqbackup is not a cloud service but software that automates and encrypts your content to any of about twenty cloud service. I use Backblaze and OneDrive as my cloud services. It works with both.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

Right. It's been a while & my recollection is fuzzy. It might have been the cloud service I was backing up to that limited me. In any case I need TB of storage, not GB — and none of the free cloud storage tiers are that large. CrashPlan offers unlimited storage for only a few bucks a month. Encryption is available, but obviously that slows down backups and restores.

[jpheneger]

That is true. If it is encrypted like PGP, then the code is not breakable, at least in a 1000 lifetimes according to the military and the FBI and such who bitched a storm about it because of that, and that is the weak encryption algorithm. The only way they could get you is to intercept the key if it is emailed to you or to confiscate your computer or hack into it and get the key/s that way. I think what I would do is put the key into 1password and ditch the original key. The it is encrypted. I like that, an encryption of an encryption.

I may look up ArqBackUp. What is price? I have at least a couple of TB of images. Mostly crap and family, but also some keepers.

I do something similar to this but I create and store my keys on my IronKey thumb drive. Its encrypted and requires a password to unlock. Enter the password too many times incorrectly and it fries itself. Just be sure not to forget the password...

[seezee]

I do something similar to this but I create and store my keys on my IronKey thumb drive. Its encrypted and requires a password to unlock. Enter the password too many times incorrectly and it fries itself. Just be sure not to forget the password...

I hope you're backing up your IronKey to multiple locations. Right now you have a single point of failure if you ever need to retrieve files.

SSDs (including USB keys) will discharge themselves over time, losing all data. Toss a key in a drawer for 8 years and never use it? Guess what you'll find when you need it. NOTHING.

[jpheneger]

I hope you're backing up your IronKey to multiple locations. Right now you have a single point of failure if you ever need to retrieve files.

SSDs (including USB keys) will discharge themselves over time, losing all data. Toss a key in a drawer for 8 years and never use it? Guess what you'll find when you need it. NOTHING.

I have the keys printed and stored in my safe deposit box, just in case I lose the USB drive. Can't be too safe!