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Comment by tempfs | Hacker News Reader

How many times do people need to be burned by closed-source, cloud boxes before they learn to stop buying them?

Western Digital deserves their fair share of blame here as always but honestly the pattern of failure and consequences here is pretty well established by now.

Rolling your own remote access solution(SSH/VPN+ strict FW rules) that can be used in conjunction with your own DIY raspberry pi network share(SMB+external drive USB or docked HDD) service is just really well documented in so many articles and is very maintenance free once you cronjob the updates.

It is time to own your digital destiny people. The stakes have always been high enough to justify the time and effort. Just do it!

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> How many times do people need to be burned by closed-source, cloud boxes before they learn to stop buying them?

> Rolling your own remote access solution(SSH/VPN+ strict FW rules) that can be used in conjunction with your own DIY raspberry pi network share(SMB+external drive USB or docked HDD)

These target completely different audiences.

You can also just buy a regular hard drive that isn't connected to the cloud. But where's the fun in that, I guess?

You could also just pay a few $ a month for cloud storage and be much safer than any home made or self hosted setup.

Then it's no longer just your data. Someone else now also has a copy. How do you know they don't leak it or provide it to someone? There's value in hhavingyour data only local with some off-site arrangement.

Backblaze's personal backup has a feature to use your own private key to encrypt your backup data before transmission.

I trust Google and Apple to secure my data more than I trust myself.

I trust Google to randomly lock me out because their stupid AI determined that I'm a suspicious geek instead of a normal person. It's happened before, it will happen again.

Very secure but not in my hands. No thanks.

If the government wants my data, they can just raid me and take my home server. I trust that google can secure it from random hackers better than I can.

Arq Backup will encrypt your data (supports a bunch of different backends Google, AWS, etc, including your own)

3-2-1...

You also need the first two, really.

Could anyone recommend a specific foss stack + guide for setting this up for somebody who has no idea how to set it up? I’m most concerned about misconfiguring something, which is sort of what this Wd exploit is - somebody misconfigured an account to not have a password in this case. I can only assume they forgot to do that step, or didn’t know how to avoid doing so

What software do you use to push your files from your windows/Linux machines? How do you test your backups most easily? How do you test you aren’t leaving your device exposed?

This worked for me:

https://www.howtogeek.com/139433/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-...

I don't remember if all the instructions worked precisely without a few tweaks, as the Raspberry Pi software has changed a bit since this was written. But at the very least it's worth just perusing the article to see if this is something you'd like to tackle.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with a (Western Digital, yeah I know) USB3 hard drive, that is a file server for my family's home network. I have not set up automatic backups, but do it manually by SSH'ing into the RPi periodically. The Pi 4 doesn't seem to like powering two drives at once, so I plug the drives into a powered USB3 hub.

There may be better ways of doing this, but of course mental inertia has set in, since it works and has been trouble free.

A truenas mini is the fastest way there.

Reading zfs and truenas documentation then building your own is the second fastest.

Looks like $700 USD entry price? Might be worth it but seems overkill for a lot of people. I will read those docs however to see about building my own, thanks for the tip

Or if you got your old desktop computer, that'll do too. I'm on my third iteration of retired-desktop-pc NAS, didn't buy anything except a couple of 10gbe nics on ebay.

Do you actually saturate the 10gbits via spinning disks or is it more for the reduced latency?

Well ZFS is fairly good at caching, so while I might not be able to saturate the 10gbit/s from the disks directly all the time, it's still a noticeable jump up from "merely" 1gbit/s.

So depending on which disks is hit, I can get 300-500MB/s for uncached data.

However when copying to the NAS, it can saturate as long as there's room in the RAM cache.

In sum it was a quite worthwhile jump in performance given the investment of about $30 or so, even if it's "only" 3x in some cases.

Used workstations (hpe proliant, dell poweredge tower, etc.) on ebay plus 4x 4 TB hard drives clocks in around $700 too. Couple it with something like B2 or S3 replication and your data is safe and secure.

It ain't cheap, but you're buying reliability and privacy.

It doesn't buy locational redundancy, though; with that setup a fire is sure to take your drives with it unless you get an expensive fireproof NAS. 1tb via Google One or even Google Cloud is sure to be at least 5 times cheaper a year than getting 1tb hard drives in 2 extra continents.

How does "B2 or S3 replication" not solve this?

Using google guarantees your files are not private.

I'm not saying it doesn't, i'm saying it's cheaper. S3 or Google Cloud storage is going to be so much more expensive in this scenario. B2 is the same as Google One at $10/mo for 2TB, which doesn't include data re-downloading ($20 to redownload the full 2tb). The only benefit you get with B2 is that you only pay for what you use.

And I would only recommend consumer cloud storage in an encrypted fashion - cryptomator or rclone are great.

>I'm not saying it doesn't, i'm saying it's cheaper.

So I read this wrong?

>It doesn't buy locational redundancy, though; with that setup a fire is sure to take your drives with it unless you get an expensive fireproof NAS.

Also, B2's pricing is competitive with google and dropbox for 2 TB and under (within 50%). I haven't priced their larger tiers, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't also competitive.

I'd rather have my files sit on an encrypted volume that is easily accessible to me than try to live around integrating obscure higher level encryption schemes. It's a larger attack surface and takes integration with other software off the table.

I think your over-estimating how little most people think/care about their storage drives.

Which is why google drive or the ms version is the real solution for most people. Zero effort, low cost, automatically backed up, and has a huge security team keeping your data safe.

It looks low cost, until you realize you want to store your data for the rest of your life. 10 years, 100$ / year. And after 10 years, you either have nothing, or an old synology (or similar) + enough saved up for a new one. Same reason I stopped netflix at al. Imagine you're 75, retired, you either have a massive collection of films (digital) or .. nothing.

Self hosting doesn't last forever and doesn't have zero ongoing costs. At one point I was running my own nextcloud server at home and realized that I am paying more in electricity costs to keep it running than google drive costs. After uploading all of my personal data (no tv shows, etc) I only have about 50GB of data which costs me almost nothing to store and it means I don't have to worry about backups, hardware failures, hacking, etc.

Until your malware is getting copied to your (insert cloud provider)

No one capable of doing those things would have even bought one of these WD devices in the first place...

I seriously considered building my own NAS based around FreeNAS (something I'm perfectly capable of doing), but then decided to go for a commercially available, low-end NAS for two reasons:

  1. my tendency to scope creep on the hardware requirements meant that I was looking at a BOM that was about 3x the cost of the commercial NAS.
  2. it seemed likely that I'd spend a lot of time engineering my NAS and fighting compatibility issues with e.g. Time Machine. The commercial NAS had all the features I wanted out of the box.

Ultimately, I bought a low-end Synology NAS and have been pretty happy with it. I haven't been affected, and my device is still supported 7 years later, but my story could easily have turned out like these WD customers.

Some of us don't want to spend our free time maintaining a NAS.

> Some of us don't want to spend our free time maintaining a NAS.

The issue is that, for me anyway, it's often easier/faster to just set up something myself. Most of the time it's a "configure once"-thing and then it "just works" with just the occasional updates.

And if something does tend to go awry it's usually easy to diagnose and fix. If something goes wrong with one of those NAS black boxes it tends to be much more complicated. Or if I want to add $feature_x this tends to be fairly easy as well.

Of course, this vastly depends on your skill and what you use it for: I don't have a mac so I never tried Time machine. My point is just that for some of us at least, "building their own" is actually done for the same reasons: I want to spend as little time on this as possible.

Synology are pretty neat machines last I checked them out though, we used to sell quite a few of them (over 10 years ago). I stopped using my CentOS "NAS" when I moved a few years ago, but if I were ever to be interested in buying one I'd probably consider it as an option.

No way mom and pop are going to know how to do this. Even semi tech literate people will struggle.

I've seen plenty of non-tech people struggle with more advanced NAS solutions like Synology as well.

Heck, I've been using Linux for a decade and this is something I still aspire to do one day.

The typical buyer of this type of product has no idea what "closed source" means. They went to Harvey Norman and asked the 17 year old store assistant what they should buy to keep their important photos and documents safe.

> How many times do people need to be burned by closed-source, cloud boxes before they learn to stop buying them?

Probably when their thermostat turns off during a heatwave.

Do you have one article that you particularly like?

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