[Techtalk] offsite backup for home users

Veronica K. B. Olsen jadzia626 at gmail.com
Fri Nov 16 01:13:34 UTC 2012


On 16 November 2012 01:54, Alison Chaiken <alchaiken at gmail.com> wrote:

> The recent floods in NYC make me think about offsite backup of my home
> machines.     If an earthquake destroys my residence, or I return home
> to find door smashed and 'puters gone, having complete backup on
> N.A.S. won't help.      Does anyone use a remote, cloud-based backup,
> preferably automated?     I have perhaps 1 TB total of data that
> changes slowly.     I'd like to push a copy offsite perhaps once per
> month, and obviously am willing to pay.
>
> Obviously, I am a Linux user, Debian if that matters.   I have a
> medium-fast DSL connection.    I won't consider Dropbox, with which I
> have seen an attempted exploit on my own machine with my own eyes.
> Does anyone have another suggestion?    Is anyone using Dreamhost,
> suggested on freenode's #linuxjournal?    Obviously I'm looking for a
> backup outside the Bay Area, as having my bits on another machine in
> Mountain View may not help much in the event of a real disaster.
>
> Thanks,
> Alison
>

I use Dropbox for my source code (most of it is public anyway, I do
numerical simulations in physics) as my Dropbox account has 7.4GB of space
these days and it handles syncing git repositories well. It makes things
easier as I work from three different computers (office PC, home PC and
laptop when travelling). I keep no sensitive data on Dropbox.

I also use git for a lot of other things. I have a git server at home too,
some projects are double backed up at home and on GitHub. I use git for
several web projects also, and my thesis work (LaTeX) and for version
control of the novel I'm writing in my spare time.

For my private files, documents and pictures, I use SpiderOak. SpiderOak is
a backup / syncing tool similar to Dropbox, but encrypts files before they
leave your computer. So unlike Dropbox, no one can access your data.

My email is backed up on the university mailserver as I use IMAP, and for
private things I use Gmail which arguably isn't optimal, but it's good
enough for me.

This works for me at least. If someone steals my computers in my apartment,
I won't lose any important data. My laptop drive is encrypted as it is the
most vulnerable device.

The only data that is vulnerable is my photo archive as it is too large for
the backup services. My brother hosts a backup for my sister's archive,
which is close to 1TB. I'm sure he can host mine too, but I haven't
bothered with it yet.

–Veronica


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