Depending on your threat model, they don't even have to be outside the house. If petty burglary is what you are defending against, a disk in a quiet corner of your basement is probably plenty.
I bring up threat models a lot, because I'm still fascinated with the model of data security as an adversarial relationship in which you can characterize your enemy, and thus qualify "good enough".
> Depending on your threat model, they don't even have to be outside the house. If petty burglary is what you are defending against, a disk in a quiet corner of your basement is probably plenty.
Being outside of the house protects it equally well against fires/floods/earthquakes/pets too. Protection against burglary is an added bonus.
Oh yes, being somewhere other than your house has very clear upsides, but an appropriate location is not always forthcoming. For example, I would consider it pretty poor form to plug in a personal networked backup box at my desk at work. That kind of move can also pose a risk to my sustained employment!
> Oh yes, being somewhere other than your house has very clear upsides, but an appropriate location is not always forthcoming.
It's not too hard to find one. Unless you're completely anti-social you probably have at least one tech-savvy friend that can understand the need for this kind of setup. Even better if you have more than one friend (hopefully not too be an "if") then you can have a "round robin" approach with a group of friends. An open source (so the crypto can actually be vetted) version of BTSync[1] would be great for this.
> For example, I would consider it pretty poor form to plug in a personal networked backup box at my desk at work. That kind of move can also pose a risk to my sustained employment!
Haha. Yes plugging in random networked boxes at the office might arouse some (just!) concern. When I wrote that piece I was thinking specifically of my company as I'm the boss :D
> An open source (so the crypto can actually be vetted) version of BTSync[1] would be great for this.
I'm most of the way through the non-Bitcoin / "Disk Space Marketplace" portion of a project that would work really well for this[1].
While the premise is that you would be able to rent disk space from anyone who wanted to provide it (using Bitcoin/Stripe/PayPal/Whatever), that part is going to be decoupled from the actual encrypt + distribute portion which could be pretty easily used by a group of friends to have reciprocal backups of important data.
I'm still a couple weekends away from it being usable though.
Git-annex does encrypt if you set the other site(s) as a special remote - a good way to use it with less technical friends is to get a Windows rsync server (there are some with simple GUIs for start/stop) and set that machine as an encrypted rsync remote.
Although I don't do it as regularly as I should, one compromise is to periodically backup to a USB drive and stick it in a drawer in your office. If you remember to update every few months or so, you may lose some recent things if you lose everything that you backup realtime but that's a big difference from losing everything.
I do use offsite backup in addition to regular local backups. I genuinely wonder how this will play out as video and image stuff to backup grows. At the least I'm thinking I probably need to do a better job of figuring out how to separate the important stuff from all the intermediate, rejected, etc. files.
Depending on your threat model, they don't even have to be outside the house. If petty burglary is what you are defending against, a disk in a quiet corner of your basement is probably plenty.
I bring up threat models a lot, because I'm still fascinated with the model of data security as an adversarial relationship in which you can characterize your enemy, and thus qualify "good enough".