Actions

Blog/December 2023/Dec 1st

From RonWareWiki

< Blog‎ | December 2023
December 1st Comments or questions? Click here!


I’ll not talk about “the situation” today; I’m beyond my limits at the moment. Instead, I’ll regale you with tales of my technical derring-do.

My long-time readers know that “digital security” is one of my interests. Part of security is ensuring you’ve got adequate backups of your important information. A good first step is simply to make backups in the first place!

But a robust backup solution requires you consider “defense in depth”. What happens if the machine you’ve backed-up on crashes? It’s stolen? The place burns down?

So though I have redundant backups of my information, I’ve had them distributed amongst computers strewn around my home, which leaves me vulnerable to natural or man-made disasters. The correct and robust solution is to put backups off-site. But how?

Enter “the cloud”. There are a lot of “cloud providers” offering various amounts of storage for free. I settled on two: pCloud which offers 10G for free, and Mega which offers 20G free. Both of them offer paid plans as well with terabyte storage – that’s excessive for me, and I’m a cheap lad. Both also claim “zero knowledge encryption”, meaning that they cannot view your data, which is encrypted on their servers. I choose to be sceptical of any such claims, but the large amount of free storage is perfect for my needs.

So what is my system?

  • Every night, a script running on one of my machines refreshes its copy of all the data I wish to preserve
  • Any changed files are encrypted locally using my cryptor app, ensuring that indeed only I can view the files’ contents
  • Those newly encrypted files are uploaded to Mega
  • If a USB key is in the computer, the encrypted files are also copied to it
  • Once a week, all newly encrypted files that week are also uploaded to pCloud, as a secondary backup

This gives me the ability to recover from everything but my own demise. I’m making plans to recover from that, as well…

Various:

Sarah and Yarin returned to The Land, just in time for the so-called “cease-fire” to cease. Welcome back! They had a great vacation, and now they have to transition back to the workaday world.

We’re supposed to have sunny and slightly warmer weather for shabbat, continuing sunny until at least mid-week, perhaps raining for ḥannuka.

This shabbat our menu consists of:
pita, chicken soup with kneidlach, meatballs, rice, baked chicken, three-bean salad, various salatim, and apple cake.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom and ḥannuka sameaḥ!

May God grant strength and victory to our brave troops, and sorely needed wisdom to our leaders, amen!


Top: Blog Prev: Nov 24th Next: Dec 8th



Retrieved from "https://ronware.org/w/index.php?title=Blog/December_2023/Dec_1st&oldid=13561"