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Comment by electrum | Hacker News Reader

This story is about full-disk encryption going bad, but it could just as easily be the hard drive dying, or another software bug that corrupts the disk.

If you have a Mac, get an AirPort Time Capsule. This gives you automatic, hourly backups. The importance of automatic cannot be overstated. If you have multiple Macs, they can all backup the same Time Capsule.

You can save a little money using an external hard drive, but how often are you (or your family members) going to remember to plug it in and run Time Machine? Once a week?

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If you have a Mac, get an AirPort Time Capsule. This gives you automatic, hourly backups.

If you're here, get a Tarsnap account. This gives you backups however you script them. They're versioned, deduplicated, and NSA-resistant.

Arq is another great alternative, which combined with Amazon Unlimited Cloud Storage, gives you the same benefits as Tarsnap for orders of magnitude less.

Are you talking about this? $59.99/year? https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home

And while I've got your attention, 1) are Arq backups encrypted and 2) can it back up via SSH to my own storage somewhere - like a cheap VPS with lots of disk space?

1) Yes. The format and encryption specifics are even documented: https://www.arqbackup.com/arq_data_format.txt

2) Yes. Although if you're after cheap space, Hetzner's storage boxes are the cheapest $/GB I've seen (https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/storagebox-prod...), with Backblaze B2 close behind.

Any suggestions for an arq like software for linux? Something that does encryption, dedupe, and can target anything.

It gets kinda spendy backing up a whole drive with tarsnap doesn't it? It's blocked for me at work so I can't tell, but I thought it was operating on top of S3. At bare bones s3 pricing that would be $15 a month if I'm not mistaken, for 500GB.

The problem with some of the really nice solutions on HN, like Tarsnap and Rsync.net is that they're really expensive compared to the alternatives. Tarsnap is $0.25/GB, over 5x the price of standard, 99.999999999% durable S3. Rsync.net is ~8c/GB with the HN discount, still over twice the cost of S3.

Compare that to Backblaze or CrashPlan, which do all your PCs for $5/month.

I'm not generally a Mac fanboy but damn if the Time Capsule isn't the most it-just-works backup solution I've ever used. I really want to find a similar setup for my Windows boxes.

While it's not "plug-and-play" like Time Capsule, Crashplan is pretty good. I've been using it for about a year now and so far its been working flawlessly for me. All my Windows boxes get backed up daily to my Synology NAS (note: this is a third party package, so your mileage may vary).

If you are using windows 10 there is a new backup feature that works similar to time machine, can backup to external drive or windows share I believe. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-bac...

Also, however you handle your backups, set up a calendar reminder for every month or two to check that they're running as expected. (Backup drive isn't full, cloud service account hasn't expired, correct directories still being backed up, files restore as expected, etc. etc.) I do this monthly, and more months than not I find something to fix on one of the computers in the house. I run multiple types of backups from full disk images to incremental cloud backups, so a loss of any one wouldn't be catastrophic, but it's still a good thing to stay on top of. Just had a hard drive die last week actually, although ironically it was a backup drive...

Another popular alternative is Arq, which will back up to pretty much anything.

[0]: https://www.arqbackup.com/

Seconded. An AirPort Time Capsule is so worth the investment. I can't praise it enough and you can't get me to shut up about it. My wife and I had our Macbooks (our only computers) stolen this weekend and we are back up and running with new Macbooks with all our data intact. My only regret is not turning on FileFault, thinking it would make our computers slow.

> This story is about full-disk encryption going bad, but it could just as easily be the hard drive dying, or another software bug that corrupts the disk.

Not really. Those 4KB with the encryption key are EVERYTHING in full disk encryption. There's nothing equivalently important in unencrypted disks.

Yep, ultimately it boils down to "have automatic backups."

FDE further complicates things, though, as if the volume master key is corrupted everything is lost. If my hard drive dies, there's a decent chance that a data recovery shop can recover at least some of the data.

>If you have a Mac, get an AirPort Time Capsule.

Or, if you are stingy and/or enjoy a bit of occasional sysadmin DIY, get a Linux box and configure it to look like a TC. There are plenty of tutorials out there, it's very easy.

If the external drive stays plugged in, you can back up to it automatically. Good for a desktop (which can then serve laptops).

Time Machine likely makes sense for laptops, though it's got low storage capacity at the price.

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