Hacker News Reader

Comment by uniqueuid | Hacker News Reader

I'm just as guilty as everybody for not doing this, but ...

perfect is again the enemy of good. Instead of a technically superior backup with rotation and all, it may be better to have some arbitrary, incomplete old backup lying around on a disk at someone's place.

View on HN

I’d freak out if a friend came to me with a disk and told me to keep it safe.

Imagining someday I go on vacation and valuables are stolen, including that disk. Now that friend’s supposedly personal data is compromised, as of course they would set a lower protection on something that is supposed to be used during emergencies.

Same if the disk gets corrupted because we didn’t realize it’s stored next to the fan, and 2 years were enough to have an impact.

Or we lose it when moving but nobody realizes the loss.

So many weird scenarios, I’d feel more confident if they gave me their kid to raise for 5 years.

Just use LUKS or FileVault full disk encryption. Your friend just has to memorize one password. If it gets stolen, it's as good to a thieve as random data.

Same if the disk gets corrupted because we didn’t realize it’s stored next to the fan, and 2 years were enough to have an impact.

I would tell them to make more than one off-site copy. It's their responsibility to not just depend on you.

TBH I wouldn't expect someone stealing hard drives along more valuable stuff to just plug it to their Windows machine and call it a day because it doesn't mount.

Also the thief doesn't need to be the one dealing with the data, the same way people stealing cars are usually not the ones brokering them, and brute forcing an offline password wouldn't be crazy long considering it's supposed to be memorable (possibly by more than one person)

Just to say, spreading backup hard disks here and there, and assume everything will be fine even if some of them get lost in the wild feels like a pretty laid back attitude in contrast to the length spent on having a fully functional 2FA system.

LUKS these days supports Argon2, which has configurable time, memory, and parallelism parameters; brute-forcing a single weak password can be as slow as you want it to be. The offline backup of my pass(1) repository on a thumb drive on my keychain takes more than 3 minutes to unlock on an i7-7700K.

Yes, the disk should definitely be encrypted, but it could be using a rather weak password that you can memorize. The key is not to put too much trust in anything, but also not overengineer the solution. Just like DVDs - you hand an old disk to someone without the expectation that it is usable, but it can become a safety net to recover some of your most important data. Lots of copies keep stuff safe.

Easy to memorize does not equal weak (i.e., easy to brute force.) You can use natural language to create very difficult to guess or brute force but incredibly easy to remember passwords.

The someone could be your bank with a safety deposit box. The payment is usually annual and not very expensive IMO at $60 - $150 a year.

Of course, you're open to the risk of loss in a bank robbery, but how often do those happen anyway?

Bank closing office and trashing box is a bigger risk.

I wouldn't freak out. I'd store the disk with the same amount of care that I store my own disks, and I would insist that it is 100% encrypted with free space either encrypted or wiped. (If theft of a powered-off storage medium compromises the data, you're doing it SERIOUSLY wrong.)

Someone who is storing disks offsite is unlikely to have only one copy. I'd offer to review his backup strategy with him, but other than that, I'm "dumb storage", how my friend uses it is his business. I'd also make clear what expectations are if law enforcement or someone with a gun comes for the disk (they're getting it, that's what the encryption is for and I'm not going to jail/dying for something that should be solved with replication).

Do you mind me thinking these reactions are kinda weird? I imagine I’d say ‘sure’ throw the disk on the shelf, and not worry about it any more until they show up years later to get their disk back.

Then it’ll either work or not, but spending any time worrying about what might -with some infinitisemally small chance- happen seems pointless.

If they messed up their system, you offer sympathy and assistance. Not your fault or problem.

>we didn’t realize it’s stored next to the fan

Huh how would that shorten the lifespan of any storage device?

fan might generate magnetic fields.

Backups are not binary. As part of a backup strategy, it may be worth the $200 or so for a USB drive to have a somewhat stale year old backup of last resort sitting in a parent's or friend's closet somewhere. (Presumably encrypted.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com