Network backup

By the end of March, I’ll be leaving this university and I’ll need to clear out of my office. What to do with the data on those two computers? I’ve been lazy and unsystematic about doing backups, and I’m not so happy about the CD-Rs I’ve burned.

The other day I went to an electronics store and looked at external hard drives: why not copy the whole lot onto a portable drive and be done with it?

While discussing the issue with a computer scientist, we got to talk about network backups. I asked him to explain why he liked the idea so much. And he did:

Just before I learned about StrongSpace I was thinking that such a system needed to exist. The reason is that there are some problems with backups:

1. People forget to do them or don’t bother because they are inconvenient.
2. If they are located in the same machine as the original data they are not protected from catastrophes (e.g. fire).
3. Making a backup means you have another copy of your data floating around, which means others could steal that data and see all your naked people pictures and health records and stuff.

Offsite backups (to a file server someplace) solve some of these problems. You use a script that is run every so often, and it magically uploads your stuff to some network storage space. However, transmitting data over the internet means that it is inherently less secure: people could sniff the packets as you transmit them, and the network admins running your internet storage can see what your files are. Ethically, they should not care, but I do know that sysadmins snoop. Plus if the police come asking for your data the sysadmins have to provide it. From a security standpoint you would prefer that the sysadmins are unable to see what is going on.

Strongspace almost solves the entire problem. It provides a connection that is probably secure for your data, and it provides lots of space. If your office catches fire you can still get your data, and if the StrongSpace servers catch fire then you have the data in your office. That is good.

The only weakness is that the sysadmins can still snoop on your files. There are ways around this (encrypted or doubly-encrypted filesystems, or just encrypting your tarballs before sending anything), but StrongSpace does not make that easy.

Network backups are the wave of the future. StrongSpace excited me because I knew of nobody else that realized this enough to offer committed hosting for backups.

Keeping the stuff online would have its benefits, too, because it would remain accessible from anywhere. But then most of the stuff won’t need to be accessible from anywhere because I probably won’t ever look at it again. Maybe I don’t need to catch the wave of the future just yet, so, after all, I’ll buy an external drive for stashing it away offline. We’ll see.