Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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I'm also backing up my photo archive on B2 via rclone and it works great, it costs like $1 for 200 GB which is awesome. But I'm not encrypting the files.

Encryption raises the barrier for both third-parties and family. In case something happens to me, I want the technical barrier to be low enough for my family to discover the backup. Another reason is that in my experience encrypted data is more sensitive to bit rot and bugs than unencrypted data. I'm backing up important work stuff with Arq Backup for example and I've had my archive corrupted once. Not sure if it was the software's fault or the storage.

My rule of thumb is ... if the data should be discovered by my family in case I'm not around, then I won't encrypt it. Photos are not worth encrypting anyway, since a lot of them end up being shared on Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, etc, as photos are meant to be shared, at least with your family.

That said I still expect Backblaze or Dropbox to keep my data private. Not secret, but private and there is a difference.

I've thought about that a fair a lot recently myself, and came to a different conclusion, but like yours as a counterpoint. What I've been considering was going analog and writing down how to get to the few places I've kept my secrets and employing something like a Yubikey to access an admin account on my computer and paper instructions in an envelope in the family safety deposit box. It's not a complex as a two-person thing I read about once, but seems like a nice compromise where I can still feel like I'm protected, but the nuclear keys exist if someone ever needed them.

Where do you draw the line around data that needs to be discovered? I'm thinking about instructions to access things like bank accounts or such that they may or may not already have access to, where I'd want them encrypted but accessible. Not that I've got secret Cayman accounts or anything, but financials are usually things i want heavily encrypted, but do want family access to in case of the worst.

I normally think of financials as things that don't need to be heavily encrypted, because we have laws limiting liability in case financial information is stolen and misused. What makes you feel it needs encryption?

Not in all cases and even if thier are legal remedies it takes months to clear it up and while you are clearing up the effects of the fraud, the person who has stolen your identity is committing new fraud until they get caught.

I know people that were arrested for fraud because their identity was stolen and someone else was committing financial crimes in thier name. They always have to carry official police reports with them just in case they get arrested again.

Honestly, I don't know, I've just always held banking info as something that must be treated as such. That said, it's not like I don't use credit cards on the Internet, but something about someone getting my bank account numbers does worry me. Plenty of people who know me well know my mother's maiden name, for example, and those two pieces of info together could spell trouble. I'm also in the camp of unless it needs to be shared, may as well treat it as private, and that includes encryption.

If it were true then an identity theft would be called a bank robbery https://youtu.be/CS9ptA3Ya9E

That's an interesting viewpoint to strike a balance between privacy and secrecy.

Can you shed some light on how you share the photos with non-technical family and friends, given that B2 has no app as such?

I have some experience with AWS/Azure and both of them do not support folders, and the workaround is to have slashes in the filename to create a virtual directory. Is it the same with B2?

I'm only using B2 for backup and it's doing a fine job, since from what I understand it also does unlimited history of the files, so in case files get corrupted, theoretically I still have previous versions around.

I keep my photos on Dropbox too, which is how I share them with family, besides sending files over WhatsApp, which is popular these days. But they only provide the history of changes for 1 month, or 3 months for Pro. As has been said before, solutions like Dropbox are not reliable for doing backups without specialized software like Rclone or Arq Backup, that can keep a version history.

My archive is currently less than 150 GB, so B2 is really cheap. I also have an offline backup on a portable hard drive. The idea with backups is that if you have data you care about, then it's a good idea to have at least 2 backups in different locations, made via different software.

> I have some experience with AWS/Azure and both of them do not support folders, and the workaround is to have slashes in the filename to create a virtual directory. Is it the same with B2?

B2 has folders, you can navigate them in the online interface. That said the service doesn't have polished apps available, being a platform like S3. It has no desktop or mobile apps currently. Although if they survive, given its price, I'm sure apps will happen at some point.

B2 doesn't have folders.

The online interface simply assumes that a slash in the filename should be represented as a folder; and they encourage apps to do the same. I believe they also enforce a max distance between slashes that is smaller than the max filename length.

What this means is that their is no way to, for instance, query what the root directories are, short of listing all files.

If you have a directory, you can list its contents using a prefix search (although the prefix need not be a directory, and this will not just list the toplevel elements)

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

>their is no way to, for instance, query what the root directories are, short of listing all files

This is not true! Try this from the b2.py command line:

b2.py ls <bucketName>

That would list all the top level folders. The APIs are designed to support two things: 1) listing all files, or 2) navigating and listing the contents of each folder.

> it also does unlimited history of the files

Yes, but you're paying for that storage. If you sync 100GB of photos then locally make a small EXIF data change to all of them and sync again, you're now paying for 200GB of storage. B2 has Lifecycle Rules [0] to help keep versions from getting out of control and the API has methods for handling versions for clients like rclone [1] to use.

B2 doesn't have it's own desktop app but 3rd party desktop apps like Cyberduck use the API work with B2.

[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-b2-lifecycle-rules/ [1] https://rclone.org/b2/#versions

I would like to point out that given [1] in the US that means online services don't agree with your balance. Anything that is hosted is accessible to law enforcement, and potentially to anyone that has a legal disagreement with you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)

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