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Data Safety In a Time of Natural Disasters
CowboyRobot writes "The National Weather Service has begun testing the way it labels natural disasters. It's hoping that the new warnings, which include words like 'catastrophic,' 'complete devastation likely,' and 'unsurvivable,' will make people more likely to take action to save their lives. But what about their digital lives? Recommendations include: Keep all electronics out of basements and off the floor; Unplug your hardware; Buy a surge protector; Enclose anything valuable in plastic. If the National Weather Service issued a 'complete devastation' warning today, would your data be ready?"
Cloud storage. Imagine how much data you can store in a hurricane!
Either we'd grab the laptops, or the NAS (which the laptops back up onto) on the way out. And if we weren't home, then we'd still have a not-horribly-old backup over at the parental units' place.
"Stick Your Head Between Your Legs and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye" Warning. I guess "Unsurvivable" covers this in a less colorful way. Look, hard copy everything and if not there's still DVDs and CDs to be burned. Personal data can easily be burned on a CD. Keep a copy in a bank vault and at home. You can even keep a thumb drive on you, I did this for years. These days there are cloud services but I like hard data. It's less secure but you can even e-mail yourself data. I have actually done this before as a back up since it can be accessed from your local Starbucks. Consider FTPs since they are fairly cheap and semi secure. The whole point is to get your data away from home to keep it safe.
Encrypt your stuff, send to a friend elsewhere in the world. He can likewise encrypt his stuff and send to you. Doesn't even need any fancy cryptographic stuff - even the non-techies can set a password on a winrar archive, and winrar's crypto is sufficiently hard to break that the only way I've ever found is to brute-force the password - which still is very slow, due to the use of a multi-round hardened hash.
Read above comment and follow its advice, it's all you need.
..and if it's electronic then it can't hurt to put it in a Faraday cage...
If I am not going to survive, I won't be around to care if my data does or not.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If I had to physically escape with my data, it would take less than a minute. Pull off the side-panel to my case. Unplug my HDDs and pull the cage they're attached to. Toss that into a bag, or if time wasn't critical, look into safer solutions like anti-static bags or at least a freezer ziplock or something.
Anything else in the system is easily replaceable in a disaster.
Surely Dino Londis meant "time of natural disaster" (note the singular). It's unlikely that (in fact, it is irrelevant if) multiple disasters strike at once when a single one is sufficient to wipe you and your valuable data from this disk, err, sphere.
And since when is 2012 known as The Year of Natural Disasters? Is this an article about articles about consequences of interpretations of a Mayan calendar? No? Just asking ...
http://www.pelican-case.com/ If you break it they replace it. They are awesome and water proof cases. Just build you system inside, something happens, close the door. Done.
... try not building your house in an area prone to hurricanes. Or, if you're going to do that, try not living in a house constructed along the same basic design as a plywood packing crate.
Most of the houses in the US would simply not be passed as fit for human habitation in the UK, because of their shoddy thin-crappy-wood-over-thin-crappy-frame construction.
A previous Slashdot topic (many months ago) pointed out this program.
/External drive/local file folder) and configure what get's automatically backed up.
http://www.crashplan.com/ (Mac, windows, linux)
I've been using it for a few months and it has proven very reliable and useful. You can use it for free with a few unobtrusive ads in the UI. Thier business strategy seems to be to sell you storage space on their servers, but you don't need to pay a dime to use your own or your friends hard drive space.
You can set up all your pc's to backup to each other or certain locations (PC in your group/ Friends PC
You can give out "referral keys" to your friends so they can store on your computer(s) and vica versa, however you can't see their files because you don't have their password.
Using this setup I have all my PC's backed up to my server. All my critical documents and family photos backed up off site to a friends PC and also to an external drive that spends 99% of it's time in a fire safe. I have also got my family in different towns and countries backed up to me.
It also does journaling so you can recover an older version of a file.
So choose a well trusted friend or family member and use crash plan to arrange your off site backups.
I imagine the risks of cloud storage are average across all individuals... though we probably don't have enough info on which servers are located in Florida and how much redundancy the cloud server companies have. But we have different risks and exposures to hurricanes, floods, etc. Ultimately, how valuable is your info compared to the value you place on beachfront property?
Gently reply
In the case of a full on natural disaster of pretty much any type what will determine the state of any data you have in the range of said disaster is going to be dumb luck. When something like that hits, there's nothing at all you can do. Surge protectors, stuff off the floor, none of it makes a damned bit of difference. If you have off site backups and off site is outside the disaster zone you'll have data, if you have enough warning and can physically move your hardware out of the disaster zone before said disaster strikes, you'll probably be fine, absolutely anything else is a waste of time.
''catastrophic,' 'complete devastation likely,' and 'unsurvivable,'" I think these words accurately describe the effect that their new, scary vocabulary choices will have on their credibility. Really, no matter how dramatic your warning is, some people are just going to think they can tough it out - has far more to do with the temperament of the person than with specific verbiage. Getting all hysterical might motivate a few more people in the short term, but long run it makes you look silly and might even lead otherwise sensible people to ignore your warnings.
I have a ton of photos, so do members of my family. So, we are each others off site backups. When we visit, data on external "grab and go" hard drives get synced and checked, and extra copies of the good pictures get stored on laptops or media centers, etc, to cover drive failure. At the end of a visit, there may be 6 copies of files, and only 2 stay local. No one minds encrypted files either. Need to sync something important when not visiting? Email an encrypted zip and instructions to store it.
Needless to say, this won't work in a secure corporate environment, of if all your family is in the same disaster. But for us, if the same disaster hits all of us, it probably won't be survivable at all.
I have seen a few posts about how to keep your data safe, where and how to back it up. Is it really that important? and if so use some common sense... damn..
Sentry Safe (and many others no doubt), have Safes designed to store USB powered devices, and you can connect to them from the outside of the safe. The sentry safes for this, are water, fire and security rated.
http://www.sentrysafe.com/Products/278/QE5541_FIRE-SAFE
Fabulous freeware. Using mine to backup to http://www.strongspace.com
I have nothing digitally worth risking the life or myself or my family.
Really when you come down to it a disaster is just that and keeping the people around you safe is a million times more important than anything else you may have.
That said my choice of solutions would be a FedEx box full of hard drives to a friend across the country or a good tape safe that is water and fire resistant.
Of course like most I/T people I don't back up nearly enough. ^_^
'Scuse me....something I gotta go do...
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Folks, you don't need a local/wide area disaster to cause these problems. How many houses burn down every day? Keeping your 'stuff' off the floor helps, but the only thing that REALLY works is some form of off site backup. Be that "swap the USB drive with the one kept in the bank once a week" (then you only lose a weeks worth of stuff) to automated backups. The DISADVANTAGE of 'swap to the bank' is that MOST folks have their bank close to home, and whatever takes out "home" could prevent you from getting to your backup
That said, backup plans can get a tad 'extreme'. Back when I was a kid, and just getting interested in computers (aka I think this was circa 1972) I got a tour of a data center where the folks were truly paranoid (but they were also using it for load sharing)
The had 2 redundant mainframes at each data location. The location I toured was in Downtown Manhattan. There was another center in Midtown, then there was one outside Boston, One in Chicago, One in California, London, Munich, Paris, and Tokyo. The LAST data center was in Alice Springs. Yes - their disaster plan DID figure in Nuclear War
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
If you do not have it, you are doing it fundamentally wrong anyways. If you select "the cloud" as backup target, make sure it is several independent providers. Personally, I have two vServers for backup, but my essential stuff is 10GB. What also works is a safe deposit box, if you do not mind traveling there at least once a month.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If there's a complete devastation warning, I'm getting the heck out. And some of the first things I grab will be the his&hers external backup drives. Together they'll take up a few dozen cubic inches, and you have complete system states on there for our systems. If there's more time, I might grab the towers or at least disassemble them and take out the drives, but the backups are a good, easy-to-grab start. I won't even grab the cords if I'm in a hurry...those are easy enough to replace for cheap.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
One company performed an offsite backup and stored it in a bank safety deposit box as per standard disaster recovery practice. During hurrican Katrina, the company facilities flooded and the bank flooded too! It took 3 months before the water receded enough to retrieve the backups from the bank's safety deposit boxes!
When the World Trade Center came down, it took out a major telco exchange. Replacing the equipment was trivial compared to replacing the cabling infrastructure. Read this article on the magnitude of repairing the infrastructure.
Your focus will be escape while preventing the escape of urine down your leg.
In one case, even that could be pointless....
AC, were you thinking of that when you wrote the above quote?
If you want a great low cost way to make sure you don't lose your digital life just buy off-site back up protection. Currently my two main drives which hold everything I would want to keep get backed up in Germany once a week. I think the entire deal costs me something like 15 a month Canadian, not even a value to think twice about.