Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

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I see two problems with massive offsite storage such as Google Drive 1 TB.

First, although $120/year may be quite cheap in the world of cloud storage, hardware's cheap. You can buy a 2-TB external hard drive for less than $120. 1-TB drives are going for $60-$70 now.

So why pay rent when you can own? Buy a couple of 1-TB drives every year, copy your stuff onto both, and store one at a relative's house in another city.

Open a port on your home workstation and voila! you have "cloud" access to your data, and you can rsync it to external drives.

Yes, it's not quite as convenient and share-able as Google Drive or Dropbox, and of course the drive stored at your relative's house is not accessible, but at least it's a back-up.

My other concern can be summed up by 3 letters: NSA. There's been no resolution to the problem of unfettered access to people's private data. What's to stop the spooks from demanding my data from Google, all 1000 gigabytes of it, and Google is not even allowed to tell me it happened. No, thanks.

Buying a couple 1TB drives and storing them in different locations doesn't even come close to a proper storage solution that lives in a datacenter.

Also, if you are that concerned about the NSA, you would be encrypting your data before you send it up anywhere anyways.

Raises an interesting idea. (At relatives house raises security questions..)

A storage company which essentially takes a drive that you clone from your home machine (snapshot). Then they mount that drive in a data center. You then use rsync (or a client) to get them the deltas. Or, they merely store the drive and mount it when you want to do an incremental (say every week). Otherwise it goes in a vault. Cameras in vault and drives have numbers so you can literally see where your drive is sitting at any point in time. For that warm and fuzzy feeling.

The original hard drive is shipped to them (to save you the trouble of having a tb cross the network or whatever you have.). And anytime you want they ship the drive back to you. Each drive is mounted on a VPS which only you have access to. Drive spins all the time but isn't being used all the time. Hence in theory more reliability. You also keep a local backup disk as well (this is in case your house is broken into or fire etc.).

The service would only do one thing, mount the drive and provide access to the drive.

Not a big market for this for sure. But a market no less of some size. Even for company disaster recover purposes.

Couldn't the NSA just loop the security tape to keep you warm and fuzzy while they get your drive?

Details details. Well first they would need physical access and then they would also need to know which drive number was owned by which person (not super difficult for sure but a system could be designed where it was more "swiss" in style of identification) and then they would have to break the encryption if they gained access.

I am not and wasn't specifically doing this for NSA reasons more just typical reasons why you wanted to keep an offsite backup and not have it on the same drive (and mounted) in a way that would make it less likely to get taken by hackers because it wasn't physically connected to the network.

So the question is, what is more secure (and not saying there aren't drawbacks..)

- Files stored by google, dropbox whatever - Files stored at your aunt's - Files stored in a secure data center only physically mounted at specific times (1 time every 2 weeks say) and otherwise in a locked vault identified by number. Needing ssh key to gain access which only you have. And only you know the time it will be mounted for that matter. And maybe a text message back to your cell as well (how is all of that for security by obscurity?)

For that matter safe deposit boxes aren't that expensive if you have a local bank you could simply store a clone copy of your drive there and it would be essentially safe from fire, theft and the NSA since they wouldn't know it was there to even gain (legal) access to it, right?

If the intent is to make an offline backup that can't be found easily you could just dig a hole in your local park. If it's a backup of, say, customer details, that you need access to update sometimes, then the best option would be client side encryption with a cloud drive. The rest is a magic show of busy work that achieves no additional goals.

Storing in another city or house is too much hassle for me. A buried drive (waterproof container), and DropBox, both storing only TrueCrypt-encrypted files except for pix. If the NSA still reads it, oh well it's non-incriminating anyway.

NSA is a much much bigger problem than price.

Exactly what I'm thinking to do.... Going with ownership.

A couple of bitsynced folders, synced to a home storage (and other computers, shared with friends, etc...), that I can backup with Tarsnap.

Simple, reliable and MINE! :P

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