Re: House on Fire... Do You Rescue the Computer?

Keith M wrote:

More importantly, does he get unlimited uploads from his ISP?

What do you mean? Of course. While I understand you are in Australia, in the US, anyone on Cable, DSL, or FIOS gets unlimited uploads.

Ah, and that's where the crunch is. Australia is not the United States. Some say that's a good thing, but we'll leave that discussion for another time.
Today we're talking about speeds and internet accessibility that is taken for granted in the US, is a special case here. Bang for buck wise at least.

At a reasonable speed?

2mbps up. Mozy.com actually throttles the $5/month accts to 1mbps. It's really not bad at all.

You have $5 cable accounts? Best you can generally get here is hopelessly knobbled accounts with over-quota costs that will kill you. You only see speed limited accounts where the user is paying for a useful service to start with. And even then, some ISPs charge over-quota even on AU$80+ accounts.

My internet access is 2mbps/15mbps for about $45 month. They are upgrading us to 5mbps/20mbps for free soon.

"Free*" is treated with suspicion here. Note the asterisk.

How practical is it unless you have some real secure encryption,

448-bit Blowfish.

I have a pessimistic view of useful encryption keys verses practicality of using them on a regular basis and keeping the keys secure at the same time.

perhaps more time than money? (or more money than sense?)

I'm sorry??

Many here like to spend money the 'latest and greatest'. They're actually buying crap that was sold by marketing people who talk the guff.

What can I say, some are monumentally stupid here in this regard. I suppose it happens around the world, but when all the ISPs say it's going to cost a million bucks, many are pleased to bend over and say thank you.

I have 400+ gig to go through...

While I have about a terabyte on my main PC, I only backup roughly 100+/- gigs. Mozy performs complete and incremental backups, and all of it happens transparently in the background on my PC. Relatively little CPU time is taken up, and the bandwidth usage is unnoticeable unless I'm doing another large upload to someplace else.

Same here, but it's all local. I get instant (fast) access to files too. Important when I'm doing map image processing work. My bandwidth would get eaten up quite quickly with the larger files and the frequency they get updated.

You can define file types and/or directories to protect, and those directories are automatically checked for changes, and those changes uploaded to mozy.com.

I backup everything. There's little difference to me between some and all, so I do all.

This isn't a bare metal backup. You don't backup Program Files and Windows directories. I backup anything user-created/original and not easily replaceable.

Nearly there. I have bootable recovery disks that restore the running software, another drive that restores data and the updated files within the Program Files hierarchy.

Online storage, the media-reputed "next big thing" is dead in the water for anyone that matters.

Hrrrmm.. I matter. My data matters to me. Media coverage or not, mozy.com works extremely well. Performs automatic background backups
multiple times per day, stored off-site -- easy access to the data, including any revision of the data, often times going back 6 months. I can retrieve any version of any file that's backed up.

Short of the offsite storage, mine's the same.

Mozy is one part of my backup strategy. I also burn DVD's, and cross-store copies of data on different machines.

I found that too messy (distributing data across several machines).
I don't trust DVDs for critical storage (they're only good for a few years), and it's too temping to not repeatedly burn the same data over and over, thus risking data loss due to disk errors.
And at about AU$0.75c per 5G DVD, how often does one backup to disk that's a good compromise between updates, disk reliability redundancy and cost?

And I need to dispose of all those redundant disks too. And at AU$200-300 for a shredder, I'm not exactly made of money, so snapping disks (and risk taking an eye out with flying shards) will have to do.

Especially difficult once you tell them that anything on the internet is effectively "public" information. Even if they just have family photos and other data they consider non-critical data.

Effectively public? Are you familiar with how encryption works?

Joe average doesn't know about encryption, or if he does, doesn't know about secure encryption. Or if he thinks he does, uses weak keys anyway because they're easier to type every time he wants to access his data.

(Yes, I am familiar with the early implementations of Blowfish where there existed some weak keys. While the chance of actually choosing a weak key is slim anyways, keys are now tested prior to being used in any modern blowfish implementation to ensure they don't fall in the class.)

I had a discussion with a colleague some time back about encryption.

His point was existing algorithms are useless, because GovCo (or whoever you perceive as the bad guys) can setup software or hardware solutions to decrypt existing known algorithms. A proprietary algorithm will take longer.
My point was if encryption was not already your primary game, don't bother because it'll be weaker than what's already existing now anyway.

I've come to the conclusion that both sides have enough merit not to trust either. So I don't.

I use whatever is convenient for stuff that I travel with (to protect against idiots incorporated during loss or theft), and don't let go of data I don't want to be "let go" of, that is, don't let it travel over channels that others might have access to.

Does your current backup strategy allow you to retrieve a few versions of any file across any day over a 6 month period?

Depending on the free space locally, yes. I likely don't want to go back six months anyway, I would have made MANY changes to files that would change in that time anyway. Sometimes, any more than a week, the data's so out of date it's nearly useless.
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