Ask Slashdot: Best Medium For Storing Data To Survive a Fire (or Other Disaster)

First time accepted submitter aka_bigred writes Every year as I file my taxes, I replicate my most important financial data (a couple GB of data) to store an offline copy in my fire-rated home safe. This gets me thinking about what the most reliable data media would be to keep in my fire-rated home safe.

CDs/DVDs/tapes could easily melt or warp rendering them useless, so I'm very hesitant to use them. I've seen more exotic solutions that let you print your digital data to paper an optically re-import it later should you ever need it, but it seems overly cumbersome and error prone should it be damaged or fire scorched. That leaves my best options being either a classic magnetic platter drive, or some sort of solid state storage, like SD cards, USB flash drives, or a small SSD. The problem is, I can't decide which would survive better if ever exposed to extreme temperatures, or water damage should my house burn down.

Most people would just suggest to store it in "the cloud", but I'm naturally averse to doing so because that means someone else is responsible for my data and I could lose it to hackers, the entity going out of business, etc. Once it leaves my home, I no longer fully control it, which is unacceptable. My thought being "they can't hack/steal what they can't physically access." What medium do other Slashdot users use to store their most important data (under say 5GB worth) in an at-home safe to protect it from fire?

Comments

Best medium

[Anonymous Coward]

Oral tradition. Seriously wtf

Re:Best medium

[davester666]

Have you tried repeating a story while on fire? I didn't think so.

Re:Best medium

[Applehu Akbar]

Clay tablets, then. Fire actually improves their durability.

Re:Best medium

[robbiedo]

You would need 400,000 pounds of clay per Gigabyte.

Re:Best medium

[Pieroxy]

You would need 400,000 pounds of clay per Gigabyte.

So ? Buy a bigger house if you don't have enough room.

Re:Best medium

[RabidReindeer]

Use the tablets to build walls with. Win-win!

Re: Best medium

[Anonymous Coward]

Should cut down on spam

Re:Best medium

[moneybabylon]

I have one of these tablets! But the tablet's brand is not "Clay", the one on mine is spelled "Samsung" - it should be the same right?

Re:Best medium

[Opportunist]

And in a few 1000 years people will claim it's religious mumbo-jumbo and create fabulous stories of how we worshipped some god named IRS.

What? What did YOU think that whole crap in Egypt is about?

Re: Best medium

[Anonymous Coward]

I would use any storage medium that is baked as part of it's manufacturing process. All Flash based drives run through an oven hot enough to melt lead free solder so they should be fine in a fire safe that protects paper.

I would probably buy one that comes in a metal case instead of plastic.

Re:Best medium

[fightinfilipino]

You would need 400,000 pounds of clay per Gigabyte.

how much is that in Library of Congresses?

Re:Best medium

[kmoser]

640,000 pounds of clay should be enough for anybody.

If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

There are fire rated NAS devices like the ioSafe 214 which has Synology guts.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Rei]

Or for something cheaper, M-Disc in a bucket of water. Water shouldn't get significantly over boiling in a fire (as it loses its heat by boiling off), and M-Disc is rated to withstand boiling water and not degrade from long-term water immersion (they're burned not by modifying a photosensitive dye like in normal discs, but by literally etching a hard, inorganic layer)

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[ralphsiegler]

And that's folks is why extrapolating from a little book learning to try to engineer reality without experiment or experience leads to failure. A typical house fire burns at over a thousand degrees F for about half an hour. Not only will your water be gone, so will your plastic or steel aluminum bucket.

Re: If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all house fires are complete catastrophes. I had one a couple years back and the fire dept was quick enough only 1 room and some of the attic burned. Pumped smoke into my room thru the attic hole hot enough to melt the TV.
My desktop and laptop both survived being on the ground and still work. They did however need about 20 hours to clean and getting rid of the smell took weeks. Yay dryer sheets taped to fans.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Rei]

And that's folks is why

And that's folks is why being an arse when you disagree with someone is usually mutually exclusive with being able to write proper English.

The flames in a house fire can of course be "over a thousand degrees F". Most air in a burning house is below the boiling point of water. But hey, let's just assume that your bucket is sitting right on top of the ignition source of your house and somehow remains directly in flames underneath it for half an hour. Gee, what sort of analogy could we have for a large metal pot-like thing sitting on some gas stove-like flames... oh yeah, how about a pot sitting on a gas stove (whose flames can also be "over a thousand degrees F")? Because anyone who's ever put a large pot full of water on the stove (for example for canning) can tell you that it will NOT boil off in half an hour.

And seriously, a steel bucket will be "gone"? Methinks you need to look up the melting point of steel.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the structural damage caused by falling parts of the house. I am sure however that you can extend the solution. For instance you can introduce concrete containment unit and a steel one inside as well as passive cooling systems by virtue to building the whole system at the river side in such a way that water just flows trough the containment unit. Of course there is an issue of drought or overflooding which may damage the cooling system but hey nothing is perfect.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster is talking about a couple of GB, so surely an SD card encrypted if needed and kept in his wallet or car is all that is required.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Not likely in a basement at the corner of the slab and cmu walls, where that "thousand degree heat" has to transfer by gas molecules, probably from a collapsed adjacent rim joist, that itself will combust only biefly before pyrolzing due to lack of oxygen. I agree, whatever education you have interfers with your ability to discuss this issue. Your experience in residential fires must be non existant

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Slashdot Parent]

how about a pot sitting on a gas stove (whose flames can also be "over a thousand degrees F")?

I'm not an engineer, but this does not appear to me to accurately model a house fire. I think that there is going to be a difference between being engulfed in 1000+ degree heat vs being over a 1000+ degree heat source.

By way of example, let's say that you have a 22 quart canning pot filled with water and you were to suspend it over a Bunsen burner. That burner can reach a temperature of 2000+ degrees F at the tip of its inner cone, but how long do you think it will take that 2000+ degree burner to boil 10 quarts of water? Perhaps it will never boil?

I think that a house fire would transfer significantly more heat to the bucket of water than a gas stove would. I frankly have no idea how long it would take for water in a bucket to boil off in a house fire, but I am confident that it would be faster than sticking a pot of boiling water on a gas range.

Another issue with the "disk in a bucket" plan is that in dry climates, much care must be taken to maintain the water level of the bucket, because significant water loss would be expected via evaporation.

As always, the best way to keep data safe during a fire is for the data not to be in the fire.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Dry climates: put a lid on the bucket.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Another issue with the "disk in a bucket" plan is that in dry climates, much care must be taken to maintain the water level of the bucket, because significant water loss would be expected via evaporation.

Stick the disks in a toilet tank. Convenient refill mechanism, even if the water is boiling away (depending on the integrity of the house plumbing and water supply).

Or for a few bucks a month, rent an offsite storage locker so you can store all your extra shit and have off-site backups.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[rahvin112]

Not to mention the mold that would grow in such a moist environment. The fire safe (as is typical for the class) should be rated for 1500 degrees for 30minutes while keeping the inside temperature below that necessary to char paper. The walls are heavily insulated and the seals on the door in extreme heat melt and seal the interior completely.

That's the entire point of these safes, to store paper documents and firearms including ammunition the interior temperature can't exceed a threshold within the spec'd temperature and time limit. The submitter should be able to just stick drives in the safe and not be worried about a fire as long as there is a working fire department.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

And seriously, a steel bucket will be "gone"? Methinks you need to look up the melting point of steel.

I had a steel bucket full of water in the south tower of the WTC. You don't need to guess what happened to it.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[geekmux]

There are fire rated NAS devices like the ioSafe 214 which has Synology guts.

At first I was going to make a comment about how fire ratings should taken with a grain of salt, but I was pleasantly surprised by this article, which basically put the fire rating to an actual test. Nice, thanks for sharing!

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Spy Handler]

The poster is talking about a couple of GB, so surely an SD card encrypted if needed and kept in his wallet or car is all that is required.

This is better than any of the harebrained schemes proposed so far.

However if we're gonna go down the encryption route, why not just encrypt the file and upload it to multiple web hosts? SD cards in car and wallet are still subject to loss/theft/degradation, plus if the police ever get a hold of it you may become inconvenienced (because the authorities are convinced that encryption means you're a criminal with something to hide).

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[danlip]

Or a safe-deposit box at a bank if you don't need a whole storage locker. And they tend to have good fire suppression units in them.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[danomac]

If you do attempt an in-house solution keep in mind that fire is the first step - don't forget about all the water the fire department will use to put the fire out!

There are fire rated safes that are waterproof that are made specifically for media. You can source one of these out and use it - the safe will list what mediums it can protect. If all you are protecting is a single hard drive or memory stick, you don't need a huge internal capacity safe. Also, remember to look at the internal dimensions as media safes have much thicker walls than normal safes.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[ralphsiegler]

A burning house will transfer *much* more heat than a stove. There are thousands of kinds of steel, many quality steels do well in a house fire. Others become a problem like the 14 gauge lightweight cold formed elements used in many steel-framed houses. They fail and a house made with those will collapse even faster than all-wood house!

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[ralphsiegler]

You spew in complete ignorance. The heat and temperature of smoke alone can become sufficient to cause flashover fires when it is present in thick enough layer. Talking of boiling water temperatures is nonsense. The heat radiated in house fire can be tens of kilowatts per square meter, your stove is not a valid model.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[robb.moore]

Lots of great comments on this thread. Just as a background, I started ioSafe to lower the hassle factor around DR/Backup. I was using the dual HDD technique with a fireproof safe strategy (which I still think is fine btw - IF....IF you're the type to stay disciplined with this approach). For me personally, I'm respectful of the Murphy's Law. The day my house burns down will be the worst possible timing after days of forgetting to transfer drives - i know me. There are tons of ways to protect yourself and ioSafe is just one of them. ioSafe's advantage is that there's no other way I can think of to add real time protection to terabytes of data that's affordable for the SMB or consumer. Some folks might think the public cloud is the answer but for me it's not the complete solution (it's slow and has privacy issues). It can take months just to get one terabyte uploaded, let alone the 6+ terabytes I have just at my house - not to mention trying to get it all back or remove it from the internet. Offsite vaulting is great if you can remember - but it's a hassle. My life has enough hassles. I use ioSafe as my #1 strategy to protect, backup and (with our Synology partnership) create a secure private cloud. 100% of my data, no bandwidth issues, no monthly fees, manageable, private and protected against the vast majority of data loss scenarios (HDD failure, accidental deletion, fires, floods, bolted to the floor, multiple backups targets located throughout the house). Now for nuclear war and sink holes, a little cloud and offsite vaulting makes total sense to layer in where you can. My point is that no one solution covers every single scenario but ioSafe covers a bunch of them - all the major ones. Stay safe! -Robb Robb Moore, CEO and Founder ioSafe Inc.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[ralphsiegler]

Not good if you have basement, bathroom floors often collapse because of weight of fixtures during a fire. Just get a fire safe already

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh ffs, just stick it in a few zip lock bags and bury it in a paint bucket with a lid (or just upside down).

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[dave420]

You can encrypt your data on your hard disk and then send the disk to Amazon, and they will copy the contents to your storage space for you. That takes care of the speed and privacy issues. Getting it back can be achieved the same way, should you wish.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[RedShoeRider]

"Because anyone who's ever put a large pot full of water on the stove (for example for canning) can tell you that it will NOT boil off in half an hour."

One detail that's forgotten: BTU In short, a fireman can tell you that a hose, with 150ish gallons of water per minute coming from it, flowed into a fully fire-involved room.....you're going to see very little runoff for the first minute. The amount of water converted to steam instantly is way, way more than your pot of water can hold.

Most air in a burning house *at the floor* is below the boiling point of water. You can easily have a thermal gradient of several hundred degrees in a room. 150 degrees on the floor. 500 degrees at chest level, 900+ degrees at the ceiling.

To the original poster: offsite storage. Everything else is a game of mental masturbation.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[RockDoctor]

The fire safe (as is typical for the class) should be rated for 1500 degrees for 30minutes while keeping the inside temperature below that necessary to char paper. The walls are heavily insulated and the seals on the door in extreme heat melt and seal the interior completely.

There are other things to consider which can seriously alter your fire situation.

(I'll point out that I have to do fire training including a number of evacuations through burning buildings every couple of years, and have been doing it since we routinely had people die in the training. It is very likely that I've spent more time in burning buildings in BA sets than the average Slashdotter, unless there are a lot of undeclared firefighters on the board. I work in the oil industry, and dieing in a fire is a non-trivial risk at work, in addition to the normal hazards of being at sea.)

Being in the UK, we build our houses with bricks, mortar and concrete, with minimal wood. Rather different to the US, I gather, and I'm not sure how that would alter the progress of fires there. If I were to get a fire safe, I'd probably mount it by either excavating into the floor of my garage (concrete) and covering it's access with a paving slab (40mm thick) ; or I'd mount it into the concrete and breeze block wall of the garage along the party wall with the neighbours. Since I don't keep significant flammables in the garage (that is in the shed, outside ; that can burn and I'd get a toasting fork instead of getting worried.) Either of those options should take hundreds of degrees off the exterior temperature of the fire safe. Putting it in the floor would be better temperature-wise, but not so good for protection from water damage. But since I've also got water-proof diving pouches and silica gel in abundance, I'm pretty sanguine about water.

Where to site a fire safe - for a combination of low fire risk and acceptable security (I wouldn't put it in the shed!) is going to have a very big effect on the conditions it is exposed to.

Re:If you insist on keeping physical hardware

[afidel]

Shit, why not sync it to your cellphone? If it's a couple GB it'll fit on any reasonably sized phone and who leaves their phone anywhere? If you're really paranoid then encrypt it before the sync in case you somehow lose your phone.

Cloud but hear me

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the thing about hackers: they don't care about your data unless it contains banking information or anything that's got to do with your ID.
One thing you can do to prevent that is using encrypted container. Mount them when you need them, unmount them when done/

Second, if you're worried a company could go out of business, get more than one provider and sync data across them.

Re:Cloud but hear me

[Pieroxy]

Agreed. I use an alternative to all this: all my data is backed up on a small eeePC in my attic and send sent to a friend of mine through SSH. I have 1TB of data storage at his place, and I offer in return 1TB of data storage in my place for him to do the same.

Sensitive stuff is encrypted so I don't care if he can see all my files. The bulk of it is pictures/personal movies in terms of size. encfs works wonders for low sensitive data, the rest can go through TrueCrypt/keepass2 encryption or even PGP.

And it costs me zero (minus the 1TB I have reserved for him).

Re:Cloud but hear me

[Anonymous Coward]

Encryption on the cloud is the cheap and obvious way to go. Of course, it helps if you're like me and poor enough that nobody cares about your "important" documents.

Re:Cloud but hear me

[MachineShedFred]

Exactly - cloud storage is available for free, or a pittance. Use an encrypted disk image to hold your stuff, using a strong password and a strong cipher. And then put that encrypted container on a couple different services just to make sure that DropBox / Amazon S3 / Google Drive / iCloud don't have a fire.

Problem solved.

Re:Cloud but hear me

[Copid]

Exactly. Good encryption makes cloud backup a perfectly safe option. Encrypt your stuff something good and secure like GnuPG, stick it in one or more cloud providers, and then just worry about backing up your keys. Keys are small enough that you can even keep your backups as hard copies, and you only have to do the physical backup once instead of every week or whatever. It's a pain in the ass to type hard copies in correctly, but printed paper survives a lot better in a fire safe than digital media. Keep one easy to use digital copy and one heat-resistant paper copy in your fire safe and do the same in a safe deposit box somewhere.

I've been emailing myself important encrypted documents for years and letting gmail index them for easy retrieval. I can't imagine going back to dealing with having to regularly get physical media backups somewhere off-site and safe. It's just bits. Use computers to move them.

Re:Cloud but hear me

[Anonymous Coward]

>

Second, if you're worried a company could go out of business, get more than one provider and sync data across them.

Or decide if you can live with the 5 minutes of exposure from when your provider goes dark until you move your data to another.

Re:Cloud but hear me

[snadrus]

Exactly!
Now in a business context this means expensing a business-class connection into your personal household (or a director-level person's), and having a small computer there with a something that's running redundant drives.

The only "untrusted" piece is the network itself (so, use SSH). A nightly Rsync should do. Place it in a house of someone who is already responsible for that data's security and you have no conflict of interest. Disk encryption avoids damages from a home break-in theft.

Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

is the only safe solution.

Re:Offsite

[Walter White]

is the only safe solution.

Fire and possibility of other disaster is exactly why offsite backup is so important.

Re:Offsite

[Bite The Pillow]

Offsite, or fireproof stuff. Your choice.

Re:Offsite

[halltk1983]

This. A safety deposit box at your bank is your best and safest bet. Encrypt the drive if you're worried that someone cares enough to go Italian Job on you.

Re:Offsite

[DanielRavenNest]

That's what bank safety deposit boxes are for. Offsite, hard to break into, more or less fireproof through sheer mass, even if the building around it burns. Ask the bank about how thick the walls are, though. Class 3 is recommended (12 inches thick concrete), with additional outside fireproofing.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

Just make sure whatever you use is in a waterproof container. A friend had a fire at their bank and the safe deposit contents were soaked. Water apparently got through the small gaps in the front due to the high pressure.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

2 cheap external hard drives. Use Acronis (or if you are lucky enough to have a copy of Norton Ghost) or other cloner to clone your entire hard drive including operating system to one or the other external overnight, keep the other drive in your car and swap out every day. Use a password/encryption to safeguard your data in case you lose one.

Simple, cheap, I've got this solution running in every dental or medical office I support. It not only saves their data in case of disaster, but also in case of ransomware or other serious infection.

Re:Offsite

[BLKMGK]

Truecrypt volume on an external drive kept in a Tupperware container in a safety deposit box that's a duplicate of the one you keep at home in a safe. It's not an Italian Job I'd be worried about it would be someone in authority deciding they needed to have a peek. Chances of a fire at the bank AND at the home at the same time are pretty far fetched. Can sub friend's home for safety deposit box easily enough and maybe even do an exchange but use a locked box so said friend doesn't decide to use it to store his p0rn!

Re:Offsite

[hodet]

Exactly. Buy yourself a couple of 2 or 3 TB usb's. Encrypt them with Truecrypt and backup all your data to both. Now store one offsite. Update your backups (rsync for Linux or robocopy for Windows). Now swap your offsite with the one you had onsite that you updated. Keep doing this.

I am just not a cloud type of guy. I know some people prefer that but it makes no sense to me when it is so easy, cheap, fast and most importantly, secure.

Re:Offsite

[hodet]

....to do it yourself. I cut sentence short there. Slashdot should implement an edit button.

Re:Offsite

[turbidostato]

"Offsite, or fireproof stuff. Your choice."

No, fireproof is no substitute. If you really value your data, multiple copies, at least one of them off site is the only way to go.

But, now we are talking about fireproof... that's not an absolute concept. The fireproof is rated for temperature outside, max temperature inside (or delta from outside) and time to stand it. First aka_bigred has to know is the rating of his vault: any support that can stand the internal temperature rate is valid; if the fire goes outside the rating, think of it as lost (you might be lucky though). I can attest recovering data from DAT tapes on vaults exposed around the limit of its rate.

Re:Offsite

[TWX]

If you don't want to have a safe deposit box and if you don't feel that you can keep things like this at work, if you have some kind of an accessory building on your property like a garden shed or workshop, use that structure to store it. Just make sure that it's either in a safe bolted to the floor or else it's very tiny and extremely well hidden.

Just make sure that the accessory building is sufficiently far enough from the structure with the primary storage that it doesn't suffer the same fate in a disaster.

At my work, 'offsite' is one of the other buildings on the campus. We have several rows of buildings with rows of parking in between, so we can store things 'offsite' where they're still readily accessible if we need them.

Re:Offsite

[dj245]

is the only safe solution.

BT sync? I sync my most important files to all computers in the house, 2 phones, and a work computer. If all of them get wrecked I'm probably dead anyway.

Re:Offsite

[Blaskowicz]

Yes, a bank safe.
The entity tends not to got out of business, even when it deserves to.

Re:Offsite

[Buck Feta]

2 cheap external hard drives. Use Acronis (or if you are lucky enough to have a copy of Norton Ghost) or other cloner to clone your entire hard drive including operating system to one or the other external overnight, keep the other drive in your car and swap out every day. Use a password/encryption to safeguard your data in case you lose one.

Simple, cheap, I've got this solution running in every dental or medical office I support. It not only saves their data in case of disaster, but also in case of ransomware or other serious infection.

Just so I have this straight in my head: you support multiple dental/medical offices, and every day, you drive to each office, clone their drives, and keep a copy in your car. I'm pretty much just repeating exactly what you said. Is that correct?

Re:Offsite

[Sandman1971]

Offsite is the way to go. I do this with my family photos and important docs. I keep a drive locked away in my desk at work and one at my parents' place. Documents are encrypted and password protected. I've got a 3rd drive that I use and swap out as an update a couple of times a year and rotate. The drives are not plugged into anything so there's no chance of getting hacked. So unless there's a nuclear bomb that takes out the entire city, my important data is safe.

Re:Offsite

[MisterSquid]

....to do it yourself. I cut sentence short there. Slashdot should implement an edit button.

Most users don't know it, but Slashdot actually has had an edit button since 1997.*

It appears after you click the "Preview" button and has the label "Continue Editing".

(* It's actually an anchor, but you get my drift.)

Re:Offsite

[postbigbang]

Two copies, one safety deposit box as otherwise mentioned here, and the other with your lawyer. If you don't have one, with a trusted relative who ALSO has the 2K+ software and/or hashes needed to rejuvenate the data, intact.

Only offsite works. I've been through floods and fires, and curious children and pets. Only offsite works. Forget the rest. You need to test it annually in the restoration phase, too. Keep copies of the keys.

Re:Offsite

[JWSmythe]

Exactly. You can't defend against every threat. The best you can do is go with redundancy. The chances of one site being destroyed by fire, flood, tornado, or loss to burglary is slim. The chances of 2, 3, or 10 sites all simultaneously suffering the same fate is very very slim.

Re:Offsite

[mjwx]

is the only safe solution.

Not the entire solution though.

If you want your data to be properly disaster proof, it needs to be stored in several secure/low risk offsite locations, preferably in several formats.

Re: Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

a safe, opposed to a lockbox, would keep the contents from burning if the house burns down

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

I say we take off, and arc' the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Re:Offsite

[koinu]

I favour off-planet. Who knows how big the fire could get.

Re: Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

I hold you responsible for my yogurt mess. LOL!

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as a "safety deposit box."

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

He has the dentists do that. In their cars.

Re:Offsite

[AmiMoJo]

Can't beat safety deposit boxes for storing your rare earth magnets either.

Re:Offsite

[AmiMoJo]

Put descant in the tupperware box, otherwise moisture can condense over time, especially if temperature varies (A/C fails, fire etc.) You only need a tiny amount of moisture from the air in the box to ruin your drive by causing a short somewhere on the controller board.

Re: Offsite

[Pieroxy]

a safe, opposed to a lockbox, would keep the contents from burning if the house burns down

Yes, but if a burglar comes in, the safe is probably the first thing he'll get...

Re:Offsite

[inasity_rules]

No! Supernova safe storage media is the way to go here....

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

Multiple copies in multiple states/countries.

After all, the US Government wants us all to know that there terrorists lurking around every corner and that they are ready and eager to set off nukes and other weapons of mass destruction at the drop of a turban.

So either you must give the feds all the most intimate details of your life and the lives of everyone you know or you must be prepared. Keep backups far enough apart that it least one of them will be outside the nuclear blast radius.

Re:Offsite

[dcollins117]

There is no such thing as a "safety deposit box."

Yes there is, moron.

Re:Offsite

[Captain Hook]

You only need a tiny amount of moisture from the air in the box to ruin your drive by causing a short somewhere on the controller board.

That's why I'd go with optical storage in the safety deposit box, well defined standards that any optical drive in the world can read later on.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

How much do you want to spend. Offsite is your only real option to protect the data however there are a number of variations.
There are inline encryption appliances that will allow you to store your data with certain cloud providers while managing the encryption keys locally, they are never sent to the provider, just applied to the data in transit.
If you lose the encryption appliance then you are up **** creek but a lot of these can operate in redundant mode.
Have you thought about setting up a shared/colo agreement with a similar sized/equipped organisation? Perhaps one in the same industry even? There will still be implications for ensuring the integrity and confidentiality (read hashing & encryption) of the data, but if you can get to a cost neutral agreement (or low cost) then you might find it beneficial to both organisations.
Geography also has a big part to play because you don't want to have your data stored in the same complex or possibly even state (depending on your risk appetite) and you will need to consider how much data you are going to ship between sites as that could have cost (requirement for higher bandwidth data links or a dark fibre interconnect) and timing implications that impact your RPO/RTO.

Re:Offsite

[TeknoHog]

The orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Re: Offsite

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Depends on the safe. If it is just one of those small fire chests they will take those, if it is something like a proper large safe, they had better bring a forklift or thermal lance.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, pretty much this. Other than physical markings on clay tablets or some other substance with a higher melting/ point than around 3600F (i.e. NOT steel), I'm not aware of any storage medium that is truly fireproof. Only options to buy you time under variously optimistic assumptions of heat transfer.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's why I'd go with optical storage in the safety deposit box

Didn't tests show, that a lot of them start failing after as little as 5 years time and become unreadable?

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

waterproof isn't necessary... the point of an off-site is that EITHER location may be impacted, but that they won't happen CONCURRENTLY, and thus EITHER copy is safe.

an offsite should be updated... weekly, monthly, whatever... when you notice that the offsite copy (HDD, tape, whatever) is bad, just replace it with a good one.

Re:Offsite

[Isca]

One of my first helpdesk positions long ago was for a major Insurance company. The company had a mainframe based system that held all of the insurance policies (of course) but it didn't hold all of the sales-ish information that was stored as part of the quoting system they had (this was back in the 90's). So while they could pull up policy information they couldn't bring up info that helps them close the sale like your kids names (you don't really think your insurance agent actually remembers all those details when you see him/her every few years right?)

So I get a call one day to initiate the process of getting new machines built for an agent who had his machines destroyed in a Kansas tornado. As I'm recording all the details I ask him if he had backup tapes off site and he says no, his office was in the front part of his residence (common for small towns). So I then say "you know, those tapes are really durable in their cases. Do you think they could be buried somewhere intact?". The agent pauses for a moment and says "yup, I think you're right. But my foundation is a clean slab so I don't know where in the county they are."

I guess you have to have a sense of humor about storms to be an Insurance agent in the plains.

I've always relayed this story when people bring this up. There are situations that can occur that could cause you not to be able to recover this data.

The only possible solution I can think is if you have a separate storm shelter away from your house where fire (and tornado's) can't reach. But even then you'd potentially have to worry about floods.

Re:Offsite

[ErroneousBee]

First post I've seen that starts getting close.

Maybe try expanding the requirements a bit..

• Offsite. At least one copy offsite, hold onsite copies too.
• Encrypted. In case things go missing. But where do you write down the passwords?
• Sanity Tested. Did you even look at the backup in case its just a big empty file.
• Recovery Tested. Have you actually tried restoring the data? Without corrupting your current system of course!
• Corruption proof. What happens if your system goes wrong slowly and starts backing up corrupt files and you don't notice till last years tax returns are random noise?
• Legal. What happens if the police or criminals get hold of the data. Would you be in trouble?
• Future proof. Umm... Can I borrow a Zip drive... Anyone?

Re:Offsite

[VAXcat]

Descant? You recommend storing it with some medieval music? "A descant is a form of medieval music in which one singer sang a fixed melody, and others accompanied with improvisations.". Perhaps you meant dessicant?

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just encrypted DVDs/external HD, left at a friend's house. Easier to access than a bank, and free.

Re:Offsite

[tehcyder]

2 cheap external hard drives. Use Acronis (or if you are lucky enough to have a copy of Norton Ghost) or other cloner to clone your entire hard drive including operating system to one or the other external overnight, keep the other drive in your car and swap out every day. Use a password/encryption to safeguard your data in case you lose one.

Simple, cheap, I've got this solution running in every dental or medical office I support. It not only saves their data in case of disaster, but also in case of ransomware or other serious infection.

Just so I have this straight in my head: you support multiple dental/medical offices, and every day, you drive to each office, clone their drives, and keep a copy in your car. I'm pretty much just repeating exactly what you said. Is that correct?

I think in this situation it is assumed that you would have a nominated person per office to do the cloning, swapping and carrying in their car.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

Still not a great idea.

Re:Offsite

[Minwee]

I think in this situation it is assumed that you would have a nominated person per office to do the cloning, swapping and carrying in their car.

Just remember to have another nominated person check the clones every now and then, because the first person has no idea why that little red lamp turned on and has been driving around with a blank disk for the past six months.

Re:Offsite

[Minwee]

Just encrypt the data and seed it as a torrent called "Game.Of.Thrones.Season.Six.Leaked.Episodes.zip". You'll have thousands of off-site backups by the next morning.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

The chances of 2, 3, or 10 sites all simultaneously suffering the same fate is very very slim.

Depends how far the different sites are from each other.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

Encrypted. In case things go missing. But where do you write down the passwords?

One option, write it on a piece of paper and keep it in your wallet. But don't indicate what it is for. Depending on where the encrypted copy is stored, it is unlikely a thief would end up with both the encrypted files and the key.

Another option, use song lyrics, or maybe a paragraph from a favorite book. Easily recovered should you forget the actual passphrase, but impossible to bruteforce as long as you pick something sufficiently long.

Re:Offsite

[Locke2005]

He meant that they are commonly referred to as "safe deposit box", not "safety deposit box". However, since we all know what he is talking about, who cares?

Re:Offsite

[MachineShedFred]

The only thing that is sufficiently "fire proof" is a storage container that is not in a fire - If the fire is allowed to burn long and hot enough, it will transfer heat through the container and melt or scorch anything inside.

Off site is the only reasonable answer, even if it's just an encrypted SD card at someone else's house.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

Our garage, via USB via 100kbps network suites us fine, Note that our garage is a separate building I(according to fire regulations) which is unattached to our main house., but they share the same 100Mpbs link and 220 VAC power.

Re:Offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

Just make sure that the accessory building is sufficiently far enough from the structure with the primary storage that it doesn't suffer the same fate in a disaster.

Of the natural disasters that I can think of at this time (hurricane/tornado, earthquake, flood/tsunami, fire), fire is the only one that would seem to have a chance at not suffering the same fate.

Re:Offsite

[Coren22]

Naa, just put it in rice after you retrieve it. As long as you don't add power until sure it is dry, water can't do anything to the hard drive.

Re:Offsite

[Pedrito]

Yeah, those are totally safe. :-)

Re:Offsite

[JWSmythe]

Well, ya, picking "off site" as the next office in your building would not be so good. :)

I knew one place in an area that was prone to rather bad weather, and their "off-site" choice was a guy's house about 10 miles from the primary site. Sure, it sounds good if the building burns down. Not so good if the area is flooded. His response was something to the effect that his house was 10 feet higher above sea level, so it was "safe".

That didn't matter. The tapes they were backing up to were never checked. They had no disaster recovery procedure in place, and when the day came that they needed to recover from a tape, they found out it hadn't actually recorded anything in years. Oops.

Sometimes being in the same country isn't really a good thing. If your primary site was Kiev, and the backup site was Vladivostok, things could have gotten touchy during that whole Soviet Union collapse thing.

We like to think the same can't happen here, but just as easily we could find that New York and Los Angeles end up in two distinct countries, possibly with other countries in between. I guess worrying about tax records from 1986 wouldn't be such a big deal then.

Re:Offsite

[dave420]

Hint: different parts of the English-speaking world have different ways of referring to things. This side of the pond they are frequently called "safety deposit boxes" :)

Re:Offsite

[BLKMGK]

How long are you thinking it's going to be in there?! If you aren't refreshing that thing at LEAST yearly it's pretty useless...

Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

Tar up your files. Encrypt with GPG and a 20 character random passphrase.

Upload to a cloud service, or put on a USB drive at work or the house of a friend or relative.

Why bother trying to find storage media made of unobtainium that can withstand fire or flood or theft, when you can simply and easily make a copy and store it multiple times in multiple places immune to most loss events?

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[sectokia]

Yep.... encrypt and put it in cloud, and/or encrypt and store a hdd at your moms/friends house.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, storing a second copy off-site is important for anyone who REALLY MUST have their data, no matter what. Bank vaults are reasonably safe.

Relatives' houses are also a good choice, depending on the relative.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Dragon Bait]

Tar up your files. Encrypt with GPG and a 20 character random passphrase.

Upload to a cloud service, and put on a USB drive at work and the house of a friend and relative.

Why bother trying to find storage media made of unobtainium that can withstand fire or flood or theft, when you can simply and easily make a copy and store it multiple times in multiple places immune to most loss events?

FTFY.

Multiple backups. Multiple media types. Multiple locations.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[AK Marc]

Encrypt, and put it on 3 64G+ SD cards. Tiny things you can tape to the bottom of your desk at work (or a better hiding place), one in your fire safe, and one in the car. It doesn't matter whether they are lost, if you trust the encryption. And you'll always have a copy if your main is lost.

Media is cheap. Make extra copies if it's that important. Then scatter them (in places you can easily recover them from, of course).

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[aaronb1138]

This. And it was stupid of the asker to even pull the "I don't trust cloud providers" with Google and Microsoft not going anywhere for awhile. Microsoft in particular respects privacy and permissions is the better bet. Worried about hackers, as you said, encrypt locally and upload.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud or off line.
Fire safes dont work well.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[dgatwood]

Better idea: Encrypt the data, stick it on SD cards, and then mail them to random people. Be sure to email yourself with their addresses just in case you ever need to get the data back. Imagine the thrill they'll get from receiving a brand new 64 GB SD card in the mail for free!

Then again, maybe that's not such a good idea. But it is still more reliable than cloud storage. :-D

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[AK Marc]

Encryption won't keep them from wiping it and using it for something else, or giving it away to the first person who asks. Again, can't tell if I'm talking about cloud storage.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

But it is still more reliable than cloud storage. :-D

All you people who believe cloud storage is unreliable, how often have Google, Amazon or Microsoft lost data that customer have stored with them? Or how realistic do you think it is that any of these three will suddenly go bankrupt without any prior warning?

If you just encrypt properly, nobody can get at your data. The reliability argument I really don't get. Any clever local solution you can concoct would likely be far less reliable than the data centers of Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[__aabppq7737]

Encrypt with GPG and a 20 character random passphrase.

FIFTY.

Use a passphrase, not a password

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[__aabppq7737]

Rewrite the drive's firmware so it cannot be used for anything but encrypted backup and only when given a certain key. You'll just need to borrow some of Equation's hard drive firmware rewriting malware, and use it correctly.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[asylumx]

Good point -- I was about to ask the GP where he planned to store the 20 character random passphrase that was also safe from fire or other disasters...

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, why overcomplicate this? Cloud products like CrashPlan allow you to specify backup destinations--you can either use their paid cloud service, or else coordinate with friends to carve out space on each others' machines. Files are encrypted so only you can get to them. With friends, the assumption would be that they're not going to try to break into your data. My assumption with data I store in the cloud is that nobody is THAT interested in the media files and other crap I back up to the cloud. If someone really wants to steal my identity, then they're going to just steal my credit card and use google to find other information.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the wanting to avoid the cloud is more "I don't want Google/Amazon/Microsoft to have my stuff"

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[MachineShedFred]

Especially Amazon, now that they are have S3 replication between regions available. Upload it there, have it replicate to Oregon, the Bay Area, and Virginia at once.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

Upload to a cloud service, and put on a USB drive at work and the house of a friend and relative.

Yes, but how many people have relatives who are friends, who work at their home as a cloud service?

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[dgatwood]

All you people who believe cloud storage is unreliable, how often have Google, Amazon or Microsoft lost data that customer have stored with them? Or how realistic do you think it is that any of these three will suddenly go bankrupt without any prior warning?

How likely is it that any of those three will provide cloud storage that is actually affordable? S3 costs a small fortune. My home backups span... I think fourteen terabytes of fireproof hard drives. Assuming I'm doing the math right, it would cost me a whopping $5,040 annually to store those backups using S3 standard storage. And if I ever needed to restore from the backup, it would cost me an additional $15,120. So backing up for a year and then recovering from one hard drive failure would cost me as much as a new car. Even if I used glacier storage, it would still cost $1,680 per year, plus $1,330 if I ever needed to fully restore that backup.

At those prices, Amazon's cloud storage only makes sense for your most critical data, or for data that absolutely has to be available quickly from around the world (replication for performance reasons). It is completely impractical as a backup medium. Ignoring the fireproof aspect, it would be cheaper to buy new backup drives every three months than to use S3 glacier storage for backups. It would be cheaper to throw away your backup drives every month than to use S3 standard storage. That's not cloud storage; it's sky-high storage.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[bingoUV]

Cloud is free. Self-encrypted cloud storage is leak proof.

This guy (aka_bigred) is asking for under 5 GB. You can use free cloud storage - multiple dropbox accounts, gmail filesystem etc.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

All you people who believe cloud storage is unreliable, how often have Google, Amazon or Microsoft lost data that customer have stored with them? Or how realistic do you think it is that any of these three will suddenly go bankrupt without any prior warning?

How likely is it that any of those three will provide cloud storage that is actually affordable? S3 costs a small fortune. My home backups span... I think fourteen terabytes of fireproof hard drives. Assuming I'm doing the math right, it would cost me a whopping $5,040 annually to store those backups using S3 standard storage. And if I ever needed to restore from the backup, it would cost me an additional $15,120. So backing up for a year and then recovering from one hard drive failure would cost me as much as a new car. Even if I used glacier storage, it would still cost $1,680 per year, plus $1,330 if I ever needed to fully restore that backup.

At those prices, Amazon's cloud storage only makes sense for your most critical data, or for data that absolutely has to be available quickly from around the world (replication for performance reasons). It is completely impractical as a backup medium. Ignoring the fireproof aspect, it would be cheaper to buy new backup drives every three months than to use S3 glacier storage for backups. It would be cheaper to throw away your backup drives every month than to use S3 standard storage. That's not cloud storage; it's sky-high storage.

Amazon Cloud Drive offers unlimited storage for $59.99 per year.

Re:Encryption + (cloud or offsite)

[dgatwood]

Unlimited storage, provided you don't mind manually clicking and dragging everything you want to back up, and waiting for it to transfer immediately. That's a backup in much the same way that the flash drive I carry around in my pocket is a backup. It's a quick way to temporarily store a handful of files just in case my laptop dies while I'm traveling, but I can't viably back up a server's hard drive to it.

BTW, has anyone ever tried to upload a few terabytes to see if it really is unlimited, or just "unlimited"? :-) I'd try it myself, but it would take years over my 640 kbps uplink.

Oh, yeah. That's the other problem with cloud storage: ISPs with pathetically slow upload speeds. *sigh*

Off Site

[chill]

A couple of BD-Rs stored in a safe deep deposit box or over at a relative's house.

Re:Off Site

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Best solution is off-site storage, preferably at multiple locations. Encrypt your data if you're worried about third parties accessing it*.

* While the OP didn't specify a timeline it sounds like storage would be in the months to a year or two range. If you are talking about much longer time storage 7-10+ years then there can be some pitfalls with encryption you should consider.

Re:Off Site

[buckfeta2014]

Isn't Bluray (or any traditional optical media for that matter) susceptible to melting in a fire? Wouldn't a platter drive survive that better?

Re:Off Site

[creepynut]

Not relevant as it is an off-site backup. You lose the media, you should still have the original copy. Multiple locations is even safer.

Re:Off Site

[mlts]

BD-Rs are good, as well as the newer archival grade DVDs (Verbatim UltraLife, for example.)

My vote is to not just use a single medium. Every storage type has good and bad:

1: Cloud storage is easily accessible and easy to use... but is potentially insecure, and the provider can go down taking your data with it.

2: SSD is fast and usable, but when it dies, there is zero chance of data recovery, long term, once the electronics bail the gates.

3: Tape is archival grade with extremely long lifetimes, limited lifetime warranties on media (not data stored), is fast, and has a high capacity... but tape drives are extremely expensive. There is also the issue of a standard to put data on and off, although LTFS helps mitigate this.

4: Optical is widespread with plenty of drives... but doesn't have much capacity, and some disks wind up with bit rot.

5: Hard disks are quite popular, easy to use, fast... but most have just a year warranty, and tend to fail.

6: Printing to paper is possible... QR codes are one way. There is a utility called Paperback (formerly named Paperbak) which prints files out. However, I have had issues with the 1.0 version and scanning back documents, although 1.1 seems to be a lot better at getting back data. Of course, this doesn't store much data, but paper burns at a lot hotter temperature than most other physical media, so it would be useful for storing recovery keys and such.

I recommend using redundant backup media types, combined with different backup programs, perhaps different encryption mechanisms (TrueCrypt, PGP, GnuPG, etc.) This way, if one can't find a backup or encryption program (I doubt you might be able to find a copy of TC in 10-15 years, but something that decoded PGP is likely to be around), there are other ways.

Backup utilities are also something to watch out for. Every program has a different way of stashing data. You don't just need the utility, but you will also need the license key for it... and even then, I've encountered consumer level programs which will still fail and demand an upgraded version before they might consider restoring data.

tl;dr, diversify. At the minimum, use an external drive with encryption for bare metal backups, and then have documents synced with a cloud provider (encrypted of course)... and occasionally burn critical stuff to optical media.

Re:Off Site

[WorBlux]

For encryption, it may not be a bad idea to include an OS image in the clear with the necessary decryption programs. As you said it may be hard to find a copy of truecrypt in 15 years, but you should be able to find and x86 emulator fairly easily.

Re:Off Site

[bill_mcgonigle]

A couple of BD-Rs stored in a safe deep deposit box or over at a relative's house.

My bank charges $60 a year for a box - that's less expensive than any of the online services for large quantities of data. The real costs are a function of how much data you want to backup and how much redundancy you want offsite. For instance, for the 6TB drives I'm using, to have two onsite and two offsite costs twelve hundred bucks now, which compares favorably with tape solutions. I tend to upgrade backup drives every other year and trickle down the backup drives to servers and workstations, so it's not a sunk cost necessarily.

I prefer ZFS mirroring over LUKS aes-xts devices, the security of which entirely depends on how good your passphrase is. So don't be stupid and lazy in that regard. If your passphrase is really good, you shouldn't worry about anybody getting ahold of your drive.

Re:Off Site

[mlts]

ISO images are likely not going anywhere, so having an ISO of the OS, coupled with an ISO of the decryption files is wise.

I thought of having a VM... but who knows what VM architecture may survive in 15 years, be it Hyper-V, VMWare, Parallels, Xen, KVM, Bochs, or others.

Re: Off Site

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you refer to bitrot and crc issues? curious.

Re:Off Site

[worf_mo]

The medium does not need to survive a fire when you distribute the risk. Unless you are afraid that both the bank and your house/office burn down at the same time. In that case, store a few more encrypted optical discs at various friends' or relatives' places.

Re:Off Site

[AmiMoJo]

Amazon unlimited storage is $60/year. You can have real-time backup of everything, encrypted, and no need to swap disks or visit the bank. Most people don't generate vast amounts of new data every day, so once the initial upload is done maintenance isn't going to need too much bandwidth.

Quite a few places offer 50+ GB for free, which is probably enough for most people's really important data (documents, photos). No real need to back up your BluRay collection, that's what insurance the The Pirate Bay is for.

The OP is scared of cloud storage for some reason, but it's clearly the best option. Minimal effort, encrypt everything for privacy and defence against hackers, use multiple (free) providers for redundancy.

Re:Off Site

[allo]

no optical media. the chemicals in there decay over the time, a cd-r is hardly reliable for 5 years, after ten you can almost forget it.

Re:Off Site

[chill]

Almost. If you're serious about archiving low volumes of data, use these: http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

The can be read in standard BD and DVD players, and the drives aren't expensive. I picked up a DVD-R one for under $100, and a pack of disks for $45.

Then I found I have so little data that I want to preserve for a long time, I've never bought a second pack of disks. :-)

Re:Off Site

[jeff4747]

In some locations around the world, you do have to worry about simultaneous disasters. Residents of California are due for a major earthquake, and the resulting building collapses and fires could destroy both the bank and the home. Similarly, someone in a hurricane-prone area could have both their home and bank flooded.

So if you want to really be absolutely, positively sure, you are going to need some significant geographic distribution as well.

Or just encrypt it and upload it to a cloud service that replicates to multiple datacenters.

Re:Off Site

[Locke2005]

You can automate backing up to the cloud. Much more difficult to automate rotating media through a safe deposit box. Unless you're driving to the bank every day for deposits anyway, I suspect the safe deposit box is not going to get refreshed as often as it should.

Re:Off Site

[MachineShedFred]

1: Cloud storage is easily accessible and easy to use... but is potentially insecure, and the provider can go down taking your data with it.

Everyone keeps talking about this, but isn't it just an extension of "I stored my backup at my brother's house, which just burned to the ground" ? Also, it's not like Google / Amazon / Apple / Microsoft are going to disappear overnight - these are hundred billion dollar corporations backing those "cloud" storage systems.

Re:Off Site

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had cloud providers go out of business before. Driveway and Yahoo Briefcase come to mind. Of course, these came with plenty of warning that they were shutting their doors, but if one didn't use that account for a period of time, they were SOL.

So, cloud providers do go toes-up. Apple once had a cloud storage drive, tossed it, now it is back again. I wouldn't be surprised if Google, Amazon, or MS decided to not bother with the cloud business and sell or shut it down.

Don't forget... if a cloud company goes under, the next buyers of the physical servers own the data on them... and they can do whatever they feel like. A pastebin of people's Quicken data? Nothing illegal about that, since the data is theirs. A Torrent of a company's source code tree for their embedded chemical processes? Public domain now.

Re:Off Site

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably best to store them at enemies' places if everywhere you put your backups is going to burn down.

Re:Off Site

[allo]

I use harddrives, and often new ones, just because my data is growing.

Of course, there is little important data. But when i need to start sorting "important / unimportant", then it's easier to buy a bigger drive and backup just everything. Better than forgetting to sort something into the imporant category.

Why is the cloud not a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

It leaves your house true, but the same for any other proper backup option where you deliver a copy in some sort of support elsewhere.

If you just encrypt the data before sending it to the cloud, nobody in their sane mind would waste resources decrypting it (specially for such low hanging fruits).

Re: Why is the cloud not a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

from one a.c. to another, you've misused the term "low-hanging fruit". low-hanging fruit provides a benefit (mmm fruit) without much effort (it's easy to reach). in this case breaking the encryption is a lot of work for unknown results.

Re:Why is the cloud not a solution

[vtcodger]

> If you just encrypt the data before sending it to the cloud, nobody in their sane mind would waste resources decrypting it (specially for such low hanging fruits).

Same's true of an encrypted sd card or USB stick under the liner in the trunk of your car. And the data transfer rate to put it there is a lot higher than a typical internet connection.

Re: Why is the cloud not a solution

[allo]

the low hanging fruit is getting the data from your workplace unencryped instead of breaking the encryption in the cloud.

Fire-Resistant Safe

[Meditato]

Drill a small hole into a fire-resistant safe where your power and SCSI/IDE/SATA/USB/ETH cables go, then put your drives in there. Won't be easily stolen and will likely survive a house fire. Googling the terms "fire-resistant safe" revealed dozens of good options.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[sribe]

Drill a small hole into a fire-resistant safe...

That deserves a "+5 Funny"!

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be like drilling holes in your tires to make them lighter, thereby reducing rotational mass.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Drill a small hole into a fire-resistant safe where your power and SCSI/IDE/SATA/USB/ETH cables go, then put your drives in there.

For extra safety, block up any gaps around the cables with newspaper or alcohol soaked cloth.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Drill a small hole into a fire-resistant safe where your power and SCSI/IDE/SATA/USB/ETH cables go, then put your drives in there.

For extra safety, block up any gaps around the cables with newspaper or alcohol soaked cloth.

And don't be afraid to get in there with a lit match or a lighter to ensure that you have everything patched tight.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[rtb61]

Don't be an asshat, they just left out one thing http://solutions.3m.com.au/wps.... Believe it or not but, yes, you do routinely have to put holes in fire rated construction elements up to including 240/240/240 rated construction elements, each part related to a type of protection prevention of spread/insulation/structural soundness. So yes a four hour fire rated box in the roof space (if you think about it for a bit you will know why) with a hole for the cable, sealed with an intumescent sealant. You can readily make the box out of several layers of fire rated gypsum board and then finally clad it in metal, just add in more intumescent seals for the door (one use box). The cable of course simple connects up to your network.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Look you've got the right idea, but let's make it better.

Build a shed in the backyard out of cinder blocks. Put a raised platform inside that. Put a ceramic tile roof over it, open on all four sides. Put fireproof safe on that. Job done.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

I was actually about to do something similar, I have a digital 1 hour fire rated safe, I keep a portable hdd in there with backups.

It gets tedious to constantly manually perform the backups and was thinking of a way to permanently connect it to my server.

My digital safe has batteries at the front (so if they go flat they can be replaced without needing to open the safe), the wires feed through a hole in the front to the latch mechanism.

I was thinking to simply feed a usb cable through this same hole.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is great until you actually have a fire and realise your construction was useless because a barely visible to the human eye gap where the sealant didn't quite fill completely, or when the cable melted left a gap the foam couldn't fill, made any heat proofing basically useless. When you want something built bespoke you normally get a company to do it that's willing to insure the construction because they have had the facilities and experience to know where points of failure are likely to arise and what they can and can't pull off with a degree of confidence they're willing to back up with their money.

So similarly, one of the reasons you buy something off the shelf and don't dick with it, is because if it's faulty you can usually obtain quite substantial compensation and cost coverage if it fails. You don't have that guarantee if you knock something together yourself and you don't even have any way to test it at home before the event either.

It's just a way too risky solution, when the whole goal of solving this problem is minimising risk.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's just a fire-resistant box, fine. If it's a fire-resistant safe, though, then being able to drill holes in it should be setting off alarm bells in your head. Ideally the building as well.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[melstav]

You (and other commenters) laugh at this idea,

Admittedly, a DIY USB-connected solution will likely compromise the thermal insulation and waterproofing of the safe to some degree... But COTS USB-connected fire safes *DO* exist.

For one example: http://www.sentrysafe.com/Prod...

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You're pretty funny.

Let us suppose the cables and/or insulation around it don't just melt, leaving a hole for the heat to get in and destroy the drive. So I have successfully "plugged" this hole well enough to buy time in case of a house fire. We've done a great job now of making sure heat can't get in.

Or out...my sister's easy bake oven worked on the same principal.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[skegg]

Woot, I just learned a new word: "intumescent"

*sob* I love /. !

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[tlhIngan]

Drill a small hole into a fire-resistant safe where your power and SCSI/IDE/SATA/USB/ETH cables go, then put your drives in there. Won't be easily stolen and will likely survive a house fire. Googling the terms "fire-resistant safe" revealed dozens of good options.

Or just go and use IOSafe drives - they're armored and protected. They routinely do demos where they ask users to store some data on it and they'll put the drive in a fire, toss it off a building and then submerge it, then they'll extract the hard drive (or SSD, if desired for added resilience) and show that the data is still accessible.

Yes, the enclosure's destroyed in the test, but the drive inside is safe and usable.

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[bmo]

/ANYTHING/ can be drilled.

Even diamond.

Maybe not conventionally with a high-speed-steel drill bit, but yes, holes are drilled even in diamonds every day.

http://www.gemgate.com/origina...

If something is conductive, it can be wire-EDM drilled no matter how hard it is. If not, it can be lasered or waterjet cut. There is more to drilling than the twist drill in your Makita cordless drill.

--
BMO

Re:Fire-Resistant Safe

[robb.moore]

Might initially sound ok until you realize that you've just made an "oven" (heat producing electronics inside an insulated enclosure). Plus during a fire, there's a tremendous about of steam released in the cabinet and the temps of anything designed for paper storage can reach 400F+. What would be an even bigger potential issue is that the heat producing electronics could prematurely kick off the fire insulation with internal heat - rendering the safe useless when the real fire hits - oops!! ioSafe is designed to be active data storage and a safe - like an aircraft black box for data. For a few hundred dollars you can get one. Or you can spend more hacking together something that may/may not work - your choice :) Robb Moore, CEO ioSafe Inc.

Store two digital copies, but keep one off-site

[imccuaig]

Seriously, why go for some kind of difficult or expensive solution when low tech is cheaper and safer. It doesn't have to be the cloud, it could be encrypted and stored in your desk at work.

Re:Store two digital copies, but keep one off-site

[mlheur]

I concur. Use the cheapest long term storage media and have multiple copies. In keeping with your current strategy, acquire two portable fire-proof safes that only you know how to open. Keep your original data at home, put each safe at a friend/family member's house. Now you have three copies of your data in three locations. If one copy ever becomes damaged, take immediate action to replicate an existing copy to a new 3rd location.

Re:Store two digital copies, but keep one off-site

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Because tossing an encrypted 32GB USB flash drive in your desk that is a copy of another 32GB encrypted flash drive that is in a fire chest or safe at home that has backups of your important data is too low tech, too robust, and too inexpensive of a solution. This is my solution and the total cost to implement it was about $40 a couple of years ago. It is highly unlikely that both my house and work will burn down at the same time, and since the drives are encrypted someone stealing it out of my desk means I am out the cost to replace the drive but they don't get my data, same with the one in the safe, even if stolen they get a $11 USB stick now. I also included windows, OS X, and Linux versions of the encryption software as well.

The Cloud

[kromozone]

>Most people would just suggest to store it in "the cloud", but I'm naturally averse to doing so because that means someone else is responsible for my data and I could loose (sic) it to hackers, the entity going out of business, etc.

Simply strongly encrypt your data before backing it up to the cloud, you will be at no risk of hackers or anyone else gaining access that way. If you can't find a cloud storage service that you trust/trust won't go out of business, you can make your own cloud using Amazon's AWS system. The levels of security at the facilities and redundancy mean your data will survive anything short of nuclear Armageddon. Personally I'd just go with the local encryption option.

Re:The Cloud

[C3ntaur]

you will be at no risk of hackers or anyone else gaining access that way

I disagree. Encryption algorithms are constantly being tested and broken, and there is great incentive for that to continue. From the NSA and other governmental entities deliberately weakening the tools we use to encrypt, to as-yet undiscovered flaws, nobody can say with 100% certainty that current encryption technology will forever be secure.

And that's the biggest problem with the cloud. Once a single copy has been posted, you no longer have a sure way to delete every copy in existence.

Re:The Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

"Strongly encrypt your data before backing it up to the cloud..." and store the keys where, precisely?

If your house burns down and your hard disc and backups are unreadable, you've still lost your data.

Re:The Cloud

[RandomAdam]

Nothing is 100%; your fire hardened safe will not survive impact from a meteorite.

Re:The Cloud

[aliquis]

There exist no simple system where you split the data in two parts which you need to combine to get the original copy?

If so what about splitting it, encrypt each part with different encryption and store them on different storage sites.

Should lower risk quite a bit more?

But the weakest link may be oneself anyway.

Re:The Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. It has nothing to do with physical control of the data, it's the ACCESS. If you can access it, you achieved your disaster recovery plan. Google and Amazon S3 replicate to many different servers and are self healing. This is many many times better than anything you can fabricate at home. If you really are against the cloud, IOSAFE makes fireproof and waterproof HDD's.

Re:The Cloud

[ckatko]

>And that's the biggest problem with the cloud. Once a single copy has been posted, you no longer have a sure way to delete every copy in existence.

So encrypt your important data before you sent it to the cloud. If iPhone level encryption is "evil" enough to piss off the NSA, it's probably good enough for your typical data.

Re:The Cloud

[turbidostato]

"There exist no simple system where you split the data in two parts which you need to combine to get the original copy?"

You are aware this way you are doubling your chances of losing data, while this man's attempt was to enhance his chances to preserve it, right?

Re:The Cloud

[DerekLyons]

nobody can say with 100% certainty that current encryption technology will forever be secure

That's the thing - they don't need to be "forever secure". For tax data, all you need is seven years, then you can burn or shred the media you probably can't read anyhow because either it has failed or you no longer own a compatible reader.

Re:The Cloud

[swillden]

Encryption algorithms are constantly being tested and broken

Bah.

Oh, there's no doubt that cryptographers are continually creating and breaking new ciphers. But there are well-proven ciphers that have stood unbroken for decades. DES, for example, although the key size is now too small, has stood strong for 40 years, and in fact if you don't mind applying it three times is still proof against anyone in the world, as long as you keep the keys safe.

I have little doubt that AES will do just as well, and its much larger key size means that we won't face brute force becoming tractable, not unless actual breaks in the algorithm are discovered.

From the NSA and other governmental entities deliberately weakening the tools we use to encrypt

The fundamental algorithms, like AES, are relied upon by governmental entities, which the NSA is tasked with securing. We do have evidence that the NSA has been working in various ways to compromise implementations, but they can't really do that with ciphers, because if you modify a cipher, it won't pass the standard test vectors. The NSA can try to introduce things like side channel attacks, but if the NSA is actively monitoring your machine while you encrypt and decrypt (which is needed to exploit a side channel), you should just give up and flee to Russia now.

Really, if you use standard, widely-trusted cryptographic algorithms and are careful with how you generate and manage your keys, no one is going to get your data. Not even the NSA. Generation can be a little tricky to get right, but there are lots of good solutions. Probably the best is to randomly (e.g. with diceware) select a string of a dozen or so dictionary words, then use them with a standard key derivation function to produce a key, then use that to encrypt your data.

If that sounds complicated... it's really not. "gnupg -c" does a fine job. Run that on your files and upload them to the cloud. Since you're apparently happy with the security of your home machines (ha!), you can store a copy of the passphrase on the machine that does the backups, so you can automate everything. So that you can recover your data in the event of a fire, write down the passphrase on a piece of paper and store it somewhere offsite and secure. Give it to a friend or family member that you trust, or put it in a bank safe deposit box.

Encryption, cloud storage and an offsite copy of the decryption key are the way to go here.

If you want a nicely-automated version of all of that, you might want to look into the services provided by leastauthority.com.

Re:The Cloud

[Blaskowicz]

Even encrypting the data means he has to solve the back up problem again for the encryption keys. At least they can be handwritten, printed, carved, etched etc.

Re:The Cloud

[WorBlux]

Cuniform tablets burried in your grandmother's garden.

Re:The Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read "select a string of a dozen or so dirty words"
It is early.

Re:The Cloud

[TechyImmigrant]

you will be at no risk of hackers or anyone else gaining access that way

I disagree. Encryption algorithms are constantly being tested and broken, and there is great incentive for that to continue. From the NSA and other governmental entities deliberately weakening the tools we use to encrypt, to as-yet undiscovered flaws, nobody can say with 100% certainty that current encryption technology will forever be secure.

And that's the biggest problem with the cloud. Once a single copy has been posted, you no longer have a sure way to delete every copy in existence.

Err. The government already has your tax details. Why would they need to crack AES to read your encrypted 1040?

Re:The Cloud

[FlyHelicopters]

That's the thing - they don't need to be "forever secure". For tax data, all you need is seven years

This is true... and this isn't something to be concerned about from the NSA, they already can read your tax data... at the IRS... :)

Re:The Cloud

[TechyImmigrant]

There exist no simple system where you split the data in two parts which you need to combine to get the original copy?

Yes there does.
Google "quorum encryption".

In the case of simple data splitting, it's trivial to take a string of bits and a string of random bits and turn them into two strings that need to be xored together to get the original bit string, while each individual string alone reveals nothing of the original string.

Re:The Cloud

[FlyHelicopters]

And that's the biggest problem with the cloud. Once a single copy has been posted, you no longer have a sure way to delete every copy in existence.

While that is true, what is it that is so secret that you're protecting?

For most people, that is their tax returns, bank statements, etc. The government already has all that, they don't need to break into DropBox or OneDrive to read that stuff.

What else then? Honestly, I can't think of anything.

I have no concerns the NSA cares about me, I'm not important to them because I have no interest in harming the US Government or the USA itself. It may not be perfect, but it beats the crap out of what China and Russia have.

Re:The Cloud

[swillden]

I just read "select a string of a dozen or so dirty words" It is early.

Passphrases composed entirely of dirty words need to be much longer than a dozen entries. The dirty word space is low-entropy.

Re:The Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell if you're joking, but since you are currently at +5, Funny, I'll just leave this here.

Tarsnap does exactly as you suggest, without the need for you to build it on your own. Its client is read-only open source software encrypting your stuff locally, then sending it out to Amazon to be stored. The client sports a tar(1)-like interface and runs on basically any POSIX variant OS, including Cygwin.
Price: 250 picodollars per Byte/Month.

Not a joke. Check it out!

Re:The Cloud

[unary blob]

>Most people would just suggest to store it in "the cloud", but I'm naturally averse to doing so because that means someone else is responsible for my data and I could loose (sic) it to hackers, the entity going out of business, etc.

Simply strongly encrypt your data before backing it up to the cloud, you will be at no risk of hackers or anyone else gaining access that way. If you can't find a cloud storage service that you trust/trust won't go out of business, you can make your own cloud using Amazon's AWS system. The levels of security at the facilities and redundancy mean your data will survive anything short of nuclear Armageddon. Personally I'd just go with the local encryption option.

I can't tell if you're joking, but since you are currently at +5, Funny, I'll just leave this here.

Tarsnap does exactly as you suggest, without the need for you to build it on your own. Its client is read-only open source software encrypting your stuff locally, then sending it out to Amazon to be stored. The client sports a tar(1)-like interface and runs on basically any POSIX OS variant, including Cygwin.

Price: 250 picodollars per Byte/Month (Yes, Really.)

Check it out!

(Reposted my previous anonymous comment, so it might not be lost. Disclaimer: not affiliated with above-mentioned company.)

Re:The Cloud

[C3ntaur]

The government already has all that, they don't need to break into DropBox or OneDrive to read that stuff.

True, and the government is not my main concern with putting sensitive data, albeit encrypted, in the cloud. My main concern is that someday, the encryption might be broken. Once that happens any script kiddie with the right tools can to get to the data, and there's no sure way to remove it from the cloud.

Re:The Cloud

[MachineShedFred]

More to the point, why would the NSA give a shit about your 2013 tax filings?

Re:The Cloud

[MachineShedFred]

Create the keys from a phrase you aren't likely to forget? And, if you get bashed over the head and can't remember the phrase, you are unlikely to need that backed up data anyway.

Re:The Cloud

[Stewie241]

You shouldn't really have to care about whether or not the cloud provider is going to go out of business or not. We're talking about backups (i.e. a *second* copy of your data). All that is really important is that it is easy enough to add another provider to the system in the event the first one does happen to go bad.

Thus the only thing you really have to protect against is the cloud provider going out of business without warning and your local copy of the data getting destroyed before you have a chance to make a new replica.

Re:The Cloud

[FlyHelicopters]

True, and the government is not my main concern with putting sensitive data, albeit encrypted, in the cloud. My main concern is that someday, the encryption might be broken. Once that happens any script kiddie with the right tools can to get to the data, and there's no sure way to remove it from the cloud.

Fair enough...

Then the question becomes... in 50 years, will anyone care? If you had open access to tax returns from 50 years ago, I'm not sure you could do much with it. Even having the SSN, the address and other contact details is out of date, and I honestly don't think SSNs are that secure anyway with all the data breaches...

As for encryption, AES-256 is either secure, or it isn't. If it is, it will never be broken via brute force (and I use the term "never" very rarely). If it isn't, then we have bigger problems since everyone and their mother uses it. If it turns out to have an easy to break flaw, the problems will extend way beyond your tax returns...

Finally, DropBox and OneDrive have no business reason to keep your files after you close your account. Keeping files costs money, and they aren't in the business to lose money.

That is my logic and reasoning anyway.

Re:The Cloud

[dfsmith]

Because it's easier than getting the document via inter-department request from the IRS? Why else would the FBAR filings be through a different agency?

Offsite...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you plan on having the medium survive your house burning down, it'll either have to be something really exotic(CNCed cuneiform tablets?) or something boring inside a sufficiently fireproof safe (which can get costly; but are a well recognized product category).

If it gets to the point where the fire and/or water are in contact with your storage medium, luck might save you; but the odds are lousy enough that it doesn't really qualify as a plan.

You really should consider off-site storage. This doesn't have to mean 'in the cloud', anything that gets updated very infrequently can be dumped to some backup medium and shoved in a safe deposit box.

Re:Offsite...

[TubeSteak]

If you plan on having the medium survive your house burning down, it'll either have to be something really exotic(CNCed cuneiform tablets?) or something boring inside a sufficiently fireproof safe (which can get costly; but are a well recognized product category).

Fireproof safes (actually fire resistant) are not what you want to use for storing electronics or cd/dvd/bd media.

You specifically want a fire resistant "media" or "data" safe.

The difference is that "fireproof" safes are intended to prevent paper from charring/burning, so their design allows for internal temperatures that are high enough to cook your electronics. Media/data safes maintain a significantly lower interior temperature (and humidity), which safeguards your relatively fragile electronic hardware.

And it's not just enough to avoid high temperatures, your safe needs to be sealed against gasses.
In a home fire, you have all types of corrosive and unpleasant chemicals that are created from burning plastics, toilet cleaner, etc.
Those chemicals will generally attack any metal and plastic that they come into contact with (YMMV).

TLDR: You get what you pay for, so get the right thing.

Re:Offsite...

[ckatko]

One thing of note, however. There's a huge difference between running temperature and temperature limits. A hard drive can sit in a very hot room and be fine, but it cannot be run in that hot room.

If there wasn't a difference, soldering ovens wouldn't really be very useful.

Re:Offsite...

[Anonymous Coward]

If there wasn't a difference, soldering ovens wouldn't really be very useful.

Although datasheets get super picky about temperature profiles, not only the peak temperature and time spent there, but how fast your raise the temperature beforehand. And more and more random chips now seem to have humidity requirements, where if the chip package is exposed to humid air for too long after opening the sealed and dessicated box/bag it shipped in, the absorbed water will damage the chip when heated.

Chips do tend to do much better than the limits on the datasheet suggest, in part as a safety margin. But a lot of PCBs also do much worse, possibly due to bad design, soldering, and occasional random heat sensitive part.

Re:Offsite...

[Anonymous Coward]

The loss of data in a fire for magnetic storage comes from quantum mechanics. At a certain, rather-low temperature, the magnetic domains will dissolve in metals and the bits / bytes become black body radiation, even though there is no outside visible damage to the phyisical device. The HDD will still be useful as a hammerhead or paperweight, but the stored data is gone (but where? maybe a black hole or in a parallel unverse?)

Re:Offsite...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was looking for the hint with the gases. I know from my job that as soon as plastics are involved in a fire (and they almost always are!), corrosive gases are a severe problem. I.e. if you burn a significant amount of plastics in your living room, expect your TV, audio system and all other electronic devices to fail very soon or during the next 6 months.

Re:Offsite...

[AmiMoJo]

Really depends exactly how hot. 100C, okay, but 250C? If you check the soldering profiles on the components on the drive they probably won't last more than a few minutes at that temperature. Also, that's only the electronics, the mechanical parts probably can't take nearly as much heat.

Also, you need to keep the safe on the ground floor, sitting on the building's foundations. If you put it upstairs and the floor collapses the drive might not survive the fall.

Bank safe deposit box

[Anonymous Coward]

And for the really paranoid, two banks, located in different parts of the country (or a different continent).

Encrypt your data...

[Anonymous Coward]

Encrypt your data using a sufficiently strong algorithm and key length and store it in the cloud, put it on an SD stick in a safe deposit box at your local bank, a friend, you name it?

Fire Rated Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Better check the documentation on your safe. Many are not designed to resist heat. They provide an oxygen sparse environment such that paper won't burn. Thats why you have to let them cool off afterwards, if you open them too soon the oxygen from outside hits very hot paper and it lights on fire. This is fine for paper but not so good for plastics and magnetics. Best suggestion is one or more off site storage locations, such as a bank security box or a professional storage facility. How many is determined by how much you want to spend and how "twitchy" you feel.

Re:Fire Rated Safe

[Idarubicin]

Better check the documentation on your safe. Many are not designed to resist heat. They provide an oxygen sparse environment such that paper won't burn. Thats why you have to let them cool off afterwards, if you open them too soon the oxygen from outside hits very hot paper and it lights on fire.

No.

Underwriters' Laboratories (UL) certifications for fire are based on not exceeding a specified internal temperature (or humidity level) for a specified period of time. UL Class 350 safes, for instance, will maintain an internal temperature below 350 F, and humidity below 85%. This is fine for paper, but not for digital media. For those, you're looking for a safe (or safe + internal container) rated for Class 150 or Class 125 (150 F or 125 F), depending on your specific application.

An airtight safe that still got hot inside wouldn't protect paper. Pyrolysis still takes place in the absence of oxygen, carbonizing any organic matter--including paper. (Heating wood under oxygen-starved conditions is how charcoal is made.)

Re:Fire Rated Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Who told you this stupid shit? Paper will brown even when there's no oxygen. It's not going to help to have a lot of paper that's turned brown from high heat.

Re:Fire Rated Safe

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sort of wrong.
UL Class 350 and 150 have no controls on interior humidity. The humidity will likely be 100%
.
ONLY Class 125 has the restriction that humidity be limited to 85%, and ONLY Class 125 is suitable for the storage of magnetic media such as tape. It was designed for this specifically BTW.

Class 150 was designed for the storage of film, and might be ok for storing optical media, though I'd be concerned that the heat could cause warpage.

Class 350 was designed for the storage of paper. Totally not suitable for digital media.

make two backups

[Anonymous Coward]

...and store one at an offsite location. If one is destroyed, you immediately duplicate the other.
Encrypt.
You could even use cloud storage for one (I wouldn't).

Don't store it at home!

[Anonymous Coward]

Store the Archival materials far away. A relative in another state? On the next visit, take the data. I would use DVDs or equivalent, but only assume a five year life span. Recopy to the current, new long term data storage media every five years.

not what you asked

[DriveDog]

I know this isn't what you asked, and I'm interested in hearing the answer to your question as well. But offsite is really the only safe alternative. Put copies on whatever media, then store them somewhere away from your house. If you have a place you feel is relatively secure at the office, put it there. Send it home with a trusted friend. Store it in your mom's basement (if you live elsewhere). Encrypt with a phrase you won't forget. Only a thermonuclear strike is likely to destroy all your copies, and if it does, I suspect you won't much care.

Re:not what you asked

[LongearedBat]

Better yet, use a backup software that will do offsite backups automatically.

Re:not what you asked

[DriveDog]

Yes, that would be more convenient. He didn't want to back up to "the cloud". It's more expensive to set up a machine somewhere else to receive stuff than just to drop off a flash drive every once in a while. So the low-tech approach seemed to fit his wants and needs.

Don't store it at home

[Anonymous Coward]

If your really paranoid make copies and store in different places. Any storage device could be destroyed in fire, rain, or other disaster. Buy a decent fire proof vault for small items and store your information there on whatever you prefer. Other choice is rent a box at your bank or financial institution and store information there.
I myself store in the cloud and have local copy. I encrypt the information so even if accessed it would be hard to find out what's on it. These days, its not hard to secure data it just depends on what you trust the most. Anything can be lost anywhere. Keeping copies in different places gives you more options.

Offsite is the only answer.

[redback]

Offsite is the only real solution. Be it cloud, safe deposit box, or your mums house. It doesn't matter. Anything fire rated is rated for x temp for y hours, which are easy to exceed.

Re:Offsite is the only answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the poster is paranoid and said that offsite was no longer under his complete control. So for example a sibling's house, a place of employment, etc. Most of us would be good with that. But not someone who isn't going to allow it to not be under his complete control. So he needs to buy a house with a raised foundation, dig a big hole under it, put the data in there, and cover the hole back over. Every year at tax time. Sounds fun. But it stays under his control. Most people would just say, encrypt it and store it with crashplan or carbonite, but he said he wants something less likely to survive a fire and stay onsite.

Re:Offsite is the only answer.

[turbidostato]

"the poster is paranoid and said that offsite was no longer under his complete control."

Any sysadmin will tell you that being paranoid is really a good thing, but that you need to be paranoid about the proper things. He is right about thinking anything not under his control will be under control of the one taking care of it.

So what if it is not under his control?
* He won't be able to recover when need arises: make sure you have more than one copy under different stewardship and test access from time to time.
* Stewardess will gain access to the contents to see/change them: cypher & checksum them and see point above to safeward the keys.

"he said he wants something less likely to survive a fire and stay onsite."

And I want round nails going softly on square pegs. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

Mobile device

[ATMAvatar]

The summary states that it's only a few GB of data, so why not put it all on an SD card and keep it on your person? You shouldn't have to worry about temperature extremes that way, as even in the case of a home fire in the middle of the night, you'll want to take it along with you to call 911 as you rush you and your family out the door.

Naturally, you'll still want to encrypt it in case your phone is lost/stolen, but it's probably by far the safest, easiest, and most secure solution.

Stone Tablet

[penguinstorm]

I've commissioned a stone mason to carve a backup of everything I have into solid blocks of granite. Since the type of information varies (text, photos, videos, etc) I've had the Mason translate everything to its raw binary state and carved in bit by bit (Ha! See what I did there!)

These are stored in my living room, which is causing some difficulty in negotiating living space--but I feel that it's worth the sacrifice.

Sure, he complains when I edit an existing document. He's hired an assistant just to keep my grocerylist.txt file up to date in the archive. I wanted to switch it to an XML structure, but I let him win that battle.

As a recovery strategy in the even of a fire my plan is to outsource the data entry to an Indian firm and take advantage of global time zones and cheap labour. I expect to be back up and running within 7.2 years in the even of a catastrophic event, if my calculations are correct. The best thing is I've eliminated all risk of media becoming obsolete: my last archive was on a Syquest Ez 135--never let it be said that I haven't learned my lesson!

Re:Stone Tablet

[sensei moreh]

Wind and water will erode it, but that shouldn't be a problem in your living room. In the event of a fire, differential thermal expansion of individual mineral grains may cause the granite to crack - hopefully into large chuncks that can easily be restored to their original configuration without the loss of any bits. One also has to hope that any fire will not be hot enough to cause the chemical breakdown of any micas or amphiboles present in your granite. I would have recommended a more homogeneous and more chemically inert rock such as quartzite, but that would have been significantly more difficult to carve.

Re:Stone Tablet

[rossdee]

Stone tablets may be fireproof, but don't go and throw them at a golden calf, because then they will break.

Re:Stone Tablet

[worf_mo]

He simply had the stonemason add a few blocks with parity information.

Re:Stone Tablet

[NikosBelibemTsagkas]

Actually there is a company that actually does that in a very professional way! http://www.memory-of-mankind.c... . MoM physically prints your texts or pictures onto a very resistant ceramic plate which can withstand really harsh conditions and will probably outlive you by many, many years. What is even more interesting is that for every plate that is produced another duplicate is created and safely stored in a special underground salt mine. Every public plate (i.e. the copy that clients receive) also features a global map with the location of the designated mine. Therefore future civilizations will eventually find all the safely stored plates in the mine if they come across any public copy.

Re:Stone Tablet

[mcmonkey]

That's way too complicated and takes up way too much space.

I've simply encoded my data as a series of numerical digits. I then put a decimal to the left of the resulting number, creating a fraction. I then made a mark on a tungsten rod such that the ratio of lengths on either side of the mark is equal to the fraction.

As a recovery strategy I just need to measure the two segments to sufficient precision to recreate the original number. Easy peasy.

As a bonus I can store any amount of data, and my backups just take up the volume of the one rod.

Re:Stone Tablet

[abies]

This is trick is old - God did that with Pi when creating the universe... Unfortunately, we still don't know how many fingers God has.

Encrypt, Gmail and DVD at Grandma's

[Anonymous Coward]

5 GB? Zip, encrypt, and mail it to a Gmail account. Burn an M-Disc and keep it in a box in grandma's garage at least 500 miles away. (That means you have to visit her once a year, that's manageable, yes?)

Pendant

[drinkypoo]

I really like your idea. But if it's just a few GB, take it one step farther. Put a uSD card into a pendant. Bonus points if the pendant is both attractive, and a USB uSD reader

Re:Pendant

[Neil Boekend]

After a Google image search for uSD pendants I'd advice a locket pendant with some foam to prevent the card from thrashing around. Those uSD things are usually ugly as hell.
By the way, stay away from the medical data lockets for this purpose. They look quite stylish and they are intent for safe data storage but any data storage device found in those will be read in an emergency because that is what the intention of that type of locket is.

Re:Pendant

[skegg]

Too true.
e.g. dog tag

Re:Pendant

[Anonymous Coward]

Bonus points if the pendant is both attractive, and a USB uSD reader

No. You want an ugly looking thing, that noone wants to steal if they see it.

Something worthless, useless. Hide it inside a troll, or a pet rock attached to your key chain, or something
useless and that looks worthless.

A shiny expensive-looking pendant is just teasing any would-be thief.

Hide it inside a Howard Dean campaign button.

get a fire proof data safe... Problem solved.

[Karmashock]

There are a line of fire proof safes out there that have ports that allow you to run cables into the back so you can store hard drives or SSDs or whatever in the safe... in the event of a fire, the insides of the safe should be fine.

So... that is what I would do. I'd get some external drives, buy a data safe, and then put that next to the server where upon at given intervals the data is backed up to the externals in the fire proof data safe.

Re:get a fire proof data safe... Problem solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a line of fire proof safes out there that have ports that allow you to run cables into the back so you can store hard drives or SSDs or whatever in the safe

How is it fire proof with holes in the back? What prevents ash from getting through the holes and burning the contents? What prevents water or other fire fighting chemicals from getting in? I'd be interested in seeing such a safe that has such conflicting credentials.

Re:get a fire proof data safe... Problem solved.

[SirMasterboy]

https://iosafe.com/products-2b...

Re:get a fire proof data safe... Problem solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

Be sure to let us know how that works out!

Re:get a fire proof data safe... Problem solved.

[Karmashock]

There are various designs. Some of them have ports in the back where you plug into the back of the safe but don't run an actual cable. The cable that connects the internal to the external ports runs through the interior of the safe and goes through lots of gaskets.

But I think the ones that let you run your own cable are probably not a lot worse so far as safety is concerned. All you have to do is keep a reasonable seal on the cables and probably have the cables go up and down in the case prior to entering the enclosure so that neither water nor hot gas can get in there.

Regardless, you can look at this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There are lots of them like that. This is a fairly well established product and you can get similar products from several different vendors that all do the same thing.

Fire safes have been around for ages. The added feature of running a cable into the fire safe isn't a big stretch.

Re:get a fire proof data safe... Problem solved.

[Karmashock]

It is a well established product. It is as likely to fail as your car is to not start on any given morning. The technology is quite refined and well understood.

Fire safes can typically handle fires in excess of a thousand degrees or so. If the fire gets up to blast furnace levels... then your data is likely fucked. But it is really rare for fires to get that hot. What is burning in your house is typically wood framing, furnature, carpets, drapes, etc. Airflow in a burning house is unpredictable and tends to dictate the nature of the fire. Chances are a server closet is going to have TERRIBLE airflow for a fire. They typically overheat on their own without ventilation and whatever ventilation is sufficient to keep a room like that cool is going to be far than what a raging fire would need. So... unless you're keeping your fire safe in the middle of a room designed also to have the airflow characteristics of a blast furnace... I wouldn't worry about it. Put the drives in a data safe and you're going to be just fine.

I think you can buy an acceptable data safe almost anywhere. I was in sam's club the other day and I swear they were selling them there as well. Absent that, the internet can get one to your door in a couple days.

Re:get a fire proof data safe... Problem solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless, you can look at this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That is a fireproof NAS, not a fireproof safe. Is there a fireproof safe that can hold documents and other valuables, with holes in it for cables as you suggest, that won't allow its contents to burn as a result of the holes? I haven't seen one yet.

A fireproof NAS is great and all but a single cabinet that a drive can run inside that keeps the drive and other contents safe from fire, I have not seen. And once you have a locked fireproof safe, keeping a spinning platter drive running well is not a trivial matter either.

Re:get a fire proof data safe... Problem solved.

[Karmashock]

http://www.costco.com/Sentry%C...

yes there are fucking millions of them.... do a google search... come on.

Dropbox, Google drive or OneDrive

[alen]

small chance all three will go out of business and be hacked to the point where all the data is wiped. if that is even possible to wipe all of their data

if you are really paranoid burn a yearly DVD or some other media and pay for a box at a bank

Fireproof safe should cover it, seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what kind of crap safe "fireproof safe" you bought. I've got a standard Sentry fireproof "media" safe that is supposed to protect the contents from water and excessive temperatures. If I recall correctly there was even information included with it about the maximum temperature that the inside would ever reach.

Rule of three

[mrivorey]

Rule of three: Original copy, on site backup, off site backup. Otherwise you're not truly protected. I'd say SD cards, in a Pelican SD card case, in the safe for the local backup. Then look into an encrypted off site backup. The key is to make sure it is encrypted *before* it leaves your computer, and that the provider does not hold the key. Many providers offer this, even if it's not turned on by default.

Iron Mountain

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_Incorporated#Data_losses

Oh f***... Never Mind.

Re:Bank safe deposit box

[mysidia]

And for the really paranoid, two banks, located in different parts of the country (or a different continent).

For the less paranoid.... Make sure the data is encrypted. get yourself a piece of sewer pipe.. stick the media in with some baggies of Silica gel.. cap off the ends of the tube with airtight/watertight seal, so nothing is getting in Use a post hole digger to create a hole in the backyard 3 to 4 feet deep, and bury the piece of tubing so the top is at least 36 inches down.

Flight data recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh.

offsite

[confused one]

If you're serious... use offsite storage. If you think your house might burn to the ground, and you think your fire safe won't protect optical media, then backup to an offsite location. If you think your house might catch fire and the fire department will come and put out the fire before reaching the limits guaranteed by your safe, then backup to an offsite location because the fire department is going to flood your home with water in the process. If you think your safe is waterproof; and, you live within the 500 year flood zone, backup to offsite storage because a "waterproof safe" won't survive long term immersion... If you're not within the 500 year flood zone, backup to offsite storage anyway because a severe storm may rip the roof off your house and flood it anyway.

There's a theme there. You can't plan for every possibility. Either put the data onto a portable drive and store it in a local bank's safety deposit box; or, encrypt your data and backup to the cloud. Just make sure there's a copy offsite somewhere

ioSafe

[Anonymous Coward]

ioSafe makes external drive enclosures that will survive a fire.

I would recommend peer-to-peer backups - give an external drive to family/friends and backup to each other. You can use CrashPlan, duplicity or cook up another method.

3 Separate Places

[NitroWolf]

If your data is not backed up in 3 separate places, it's not backed up.

So to answer your question, you should have it on your drive where you access it. Stored on an external HD (or CD/DVD/ETC) in a fire proof safe and in the cloud (preferrably in an encrypted container). So if your house burns up and your fireproof backup fails, you'll have the cloud. If the cloud provider goes bust, you'll have your backups that you can restore to a different cloud provider.

If you don't want to store it "in the cloud" have a trusted friend store a backup drive at their house or put one in a safe deposit box somewhere. But the bottom line is, one backup of your primary data is not enough and never will be.

*Data rated* fireproof safe

[Kjella]

This gets me thinking about what the most reliable data media would be to keep in my fire-rated home safe. CDs/DVDs/tapes could easily melt or warp rendering them useless

Ordinary fireproof safes are designed to keep papers from bursting into flames. Data rated fireproof safes keep the interior temperature under 125F/50C, like say this one so computer media survives just fine. In fact, this a "Why can't I be arsed to google this for five minutes?" question.

Re:*Data rated* fireproof safe

[styrotech]

Ordinary fireproof safes are designed to keep papers from bursting into flames. Data rated fireproof safes keep the interior temperature under 125F/50C, like say this one so computer media survives just fine.

And to be extra sure, put a smaller safe inside a larger safe. The truly paranoid amongst us though use three safes!

Phillies and dutches are ok, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

personally zigzags have never failed at retaining my high and surviving fire.

West Siiiide!

I'll just call the NSA for a copy

[jfdavis668]

I'll put in a freedom of information act request to get a copy back.

Re:I'll just call the NSA for a copy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll put in a freedom of information act request to get a copy back.

2013 called. They want their wasn't that funny in the first place joke back...

Only reliable medium...

[Anonymous Coward]

...stone tablet.

Offsite storage

[HockeyPuck]

There's quite a few companies who've built their business around safe records storage.

Iron Mountain
Recall

These guys will store almost anything you want to pay them to. Documents, Hard drives, Tapes, paintings.... etc They can send an armored vehicle/courier to your source location to pick up the content.

Though if you have only a few HD, a safety deposit box at your local bank should suffice.

Lastly, encrypt it and upload it to Amazon S3's Glacier service. Heck you could upload it to a bunch of different Regions in case all of East Coast region is nuked.

Re:Offsite storage

[HockeyPuck]

Btw, if you use the S3 calculator and look at the Glacier storage, it costs $0.01 per GB per month. Stick it in two regions and it rises to a whopping $0.02 per GB per month.

A fireproof safe is up in the hundreds of dollars. Though you could buy a fireproof HD... for a few hundred as well.

I have a home NAS and back the NAS up to the cloud just in case there's a fire in my house. If I was really paranoid I'd back it up to 2 different cloud providers (Amzn, Google, Azure, Rackspace).

Re:Offsite storage

[Anonymous Coward]

How much does Iron Mountain cost now? In 1988 when I got a quote from them to store tapes, they wanted to charge several times more than the data was worth. They had just begun selling in the Seattle area, so maybe by now their economy of scale means they can offer cheaper services. Also, at the time Bill Gates was negotiating with them to store millions of photographs that they didn't have the capacity to store so they weren't looking for new business.

I've done contract work for several companies that used them. They lost a lot of data since they provided both shredded/destruction and storage services. It is too easy for their low-level employees to mix-up the two groups. Also, it seems like every year you read about a story about them losing massive amounts of data to fires. There was even a period of three days in a row about ten years ago where they lost customer records to fires every one of those days.

Re:Offsite storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Iron Mountain, doesn't guarantee that your data will be safe forever, it however follows _some_ of the legal requirements for archival for _some_ types of corporations and _some_ types of data.

There has been several episodes of Iron Mountain data warehouses being destroyed and data "missing" from inventory.
http://technologyadvice.com/cloud-backup-and-storage/blog/iron-mountain-data-warehouse-burns-buenos-aires/
http://www.eimagazine.com/xq/asp/sid.0/articleid.8BB57918-C953-411C-975A-08DB5C7C9B7D/qx/display.htm
[...]

This happens "quite a lot"; the could isn't more reliable: S3's SLA is 99.999999999% (which sounds really impressive) but implies that each 100GB of data can have up to 1 byte corrupted; 100GB isn't much these days.

Re:Offsite storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay, Iron Mountain! In Buenos Aires last year, their warehouse caught fire and was totally scorched. Nine firefighters were killed. Local investigators recently concluded that the fire was intentional (http://buenosairesherald.com/article/183111/iron-mountain-fire-deemed-arson). You see, banks like HSBC, now in the middle of a huge tax evation scandal, had their documents there... Go with Ironic Mountain, you can't go wrong.

Two backups, one on-site, one off-site

[satch89450]

For the last 26 years or so, I've been making electronic copies of my records. The media changes, the location does not. My current scheme is to burn financial records onto CD-ROM on two pieces of archival media. One goes into my local at-home fireproof safe. One goes into my safe-deposit box at my neighborhood bank.

Work backup is a little trickier. For a long time I was using tape backup, upgrading to larger capacity as the new drives came out. Then I started burning multiple DVD-ROM disk sets. I was able to start using a single pair of DVD+R(DL) when the cost came down. Again, one set goes into the at-home fireproof safe, the other to the safe deposit box.

I also use USB hard drives for in-office backup. I use Linux, so I formatted a 3-TB drive as ext4. I then use rsync to update the drive during projects at regular intervals.

The cloud? I have some people who insist I use Github and Dropbox. Github is fine for working projects, but I wouldn't depend on them keeping stuff forever -- regular backups of the working projects is the rule for me. Dropbox was going just fine until it broke completely when I upgraded my systems to CentOS 7.0 (and now 7.1). Almost useless. I'm hoping Dropbox will get a fix for this soon.

Life tip: Record your financial records on media separate from your other backups. You can then pitch the media after the statute of limitations expires (7 years for US).

Purchase an aircraft Black Box

[hcs_$reboot]

Purchase an aircraft Black Box

they are typically specified to withstand an impact of 3400 g and temperatures of over 1,000 C (1,830 F)

ignance

[PitneFor]

best practice is to encrypt your sensitive data you put in the 'cloud'. so if someone does get access to it, they cant read it. end of story, no need for any more discussion or thought. you dont know how to do it? then live with it

Magneto-optical

[Anonymous Coward]

What the world needs now is a modernized Bernoulli drive.

And love. Sweet love.

JEOPARDY!

[Anonymous Coward]

What is, What Does a Person Ask Before Burning Down His House?, Alex.

Mobile backup

[anchovy_chekov]

OK, this is not a serious solution, but the way a company I worked for years ago managed this was hilarious. One of the managers put a server in the boot of his car and had it connect wirelessly to the file servers when it was parked in the office car park.

Because he had to reverse his car in to bring the wifi into range, the joke "I'm just backing up the data" got played every time he did it. Suffice it to say, the joke got old pretty quick.

Do both

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep a physical copy but also upload to the cloud. If the cloud copy is heavy (and properly) encrypted then it doesn't matter if it's hacked and you gain the benefit of off-site redundancy in case your physical copy is destroyed. If the cloud provider disappears, you still have a physical copy.

Multiple offsite

[YrWrstNtmr]

That fireproof, waterproof ubersafe does not help when the hurricane or tornado throws it a few miles away, and it ends up at the bottom of the river.

Forget it

[gweihir]

Go off-site. Anything else is just on low amateur-level.

Iosafe.

[Anonymous Coward]

https://iosafe.com/products-2baynas-buy
But off site is way safer.

Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Put it in the cloud. Since it's financial data, the IRS knows about it all anyway.

All data shoud be open for inspection by the IRS, NSA, FBI and any other interested 3-4 letter agency.

Encryption means you have something to hide.

Just post it on dropbox, google docs, etc, and let people with much better security practices than you deal with it.

Any intrusions are just due to your poor password management anyway.

"Personal" storage should be eliminated. Its wasteful, encourages hoarding of data, and makes it difficult for authorities to vet your data.

Trunk of your car

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on the level of physical security you're comfortable with, the trunk of your car is a good option for "off site" storage. It's unlikely (but not impossible) that whatever unforeseen disaster destroys your house will also destroy your car at the same time.

Re:Trunk of your car

[Blaskowicz]

If I believe US movies and TV shows, the car is often stored in the house.

Seven year old story

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...

Encrypted offsite or nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Just encrypt it and save it somewhere. A fire safe isn't going to protect your data from a tornado or a sinkhole anyway, if you're really serious about never losing your data. Encrypt it first with a third party encryption program, then put the resultant file in the cloud. Even if someone did hack your google drive, they're not getting past the encryption. Or if you're really paranoid, put the file on a SD card and put it in a safety deposit box. But honestly, every cloud storage company is trustworthy enough to take an already-encrypted file.

This is one of the rare cases where the easy option also the smart one.

Hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Some years ago I managed to recover data of a customer from hard drives that suffered a fire. Not all the disks, bust most of them.
These thing are damn resistants to fire.

Use a safe deposit box

[notthepainter]

Ours cost about $80 a year and is open on Saturdays. We rotate our backup drives into it monthly. Yeah, weekly would be better...

Flash Drive in the Bank's Safe

[kenwd0elq]

If it's that important, rent a small safe-deposit box at the local bank. Copy as much as you like onto a portable hard drive, and put it in there.

Not medium, but place

[obarthelemy]

buy a handful of hard drives, encrypt them, do rotating backups on them of everything irreplaceable (that includes photos and documents) at reasonable intervals (monthly or quarterly or whenever you do something momentous such as taxes, for individuals), and make sure at least one of those drives is never physically at your home - your parents', your job, your bank, your SO's, your gym...

Backups are 1- offline, 2- offsite, 3- tested, 4- multiple. Miss just one of those 4, and you don't have a backup.

Media specific fire safes

[Anonymous Coward]

I did some reseach on fire safes - you can get fire safes that are safe for CDs and other media for a certain amount of time.
PS - please do some research before submitting a story.

Backblaze

[chrisgeleven]

I know you said you didn't trust cloud solutions, but Backblaze is fantastic for online backups and they allow you to set your own private key that they don't have access to.

Re:Backblaze

[Anonymous Coward]

US based company, so all stored data can be confiscated by US authority....
They even can demand uncrypting...

Nuff said...

Fireproof NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

The IOSafe N2 is a supposedely fire and waterproof nas that can survive a housefire. No Idea how much they'dcost but check them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbe0swnmBOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm4J_1jFxik

Off-Site Storage

[kboodu]

For a lot of my data, I've just take a flash drive or SSD card into the office and left it in my locked desk. It's convenient for me to get to and off-site so I don't have to worry about a fire.

Oblig xkcd reference

[HockeyPuck]

My thought being "they can't hack/steal what they can't physically access."

Oblig xkcd reference

Ancient hebrews had it right....

[cbiltcliffe]

Stone tablets, translate your data to Aramaic, and carve it into them. Those things will last for thousands of years, and nobody understands Aramaic, so it's safe.

I bury a USB drive below the frost line...

[ssw]

I bury a 2TB USB drive below the frost line. It's about 3 feet from the foundation. I use it as a Time Machine target. It's sealed in a tomato can with RTV. I used an existing through-hole (used for some ham radio gear) to connect by mac mini to the drive.

duplicity: local encryption, multiple backends

[terbeaux]

automatically encrypt your data locally and upload it to multiple locations. These locations can be public locations as only your private key can decrypt the incremental (or full) backups.

Some backends:

• azure backend (Azure Blob Storage Service) Microsoft Azure SDK for Python - https://github.com/Azure/azure...
• boto backend (S3 Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Storage) boto version 2.0+ - http://github.com/boto/boto
• cfpyrax backend (Rackspace Cloud) and hubic backend (hubic.com) Rackspace CloudFiles Pyrax API - http://docs.rackspace.com/sdks...
• dpbx backend (Dropbox) Dropbox Python SDK - https://www.dropbox.com/develo...
• copy backend (Copy.com) python-urllib3 - https://github.com/shazow/urll...
• gdocs backend (Google Docs) Google Data APIs Python Client Library - http://code.google.com/p/gdata...
• gio backend (Gnome VFS API) PyGObject - http://live.gnome.org/PyGObjec...
• D-Bus (dbus)- http://www.freedesktop.org/wik...
• lftp backend (needed for ftp, ftps, fish [over ssh] - also supports sftp, webdav[s]) LFTP Client - http://lftp.yar.ru/
• mega backend (mega.co.nz) Python library for mega API - https://github.com/ckornacker/..., ubuntu ppa - ppa:ckornacker/backup
• OneDrive backend (Microsoft OneDrive) python-requests - http://python-requests.org/ python-requests-oauthlib - https://github.com/requests/re...
• ncftp backend (ftp, select via ncftp+ftp://)
• NcFTP - http://www.ncftp.com/
• Par2 Wrapper Backend par2cmdline - http://parchive.sourceforge.ne...
• rsync backend rsync client binary - http://rsync.samba.org/

I keep mine in the trunk of the car...

[CAOgdin]

...think about it, if there's a fire and I'm NOT home, I've got the car, and they're safe. If there's a fire and I AM at home, the first think I'll do is get the car out of the garage. My biggest risk is whether the fire is between me and the garage, and I've got several alternative routes to get there (including two that involve going outside).

My main storage media are 1 Terabyte drives with 100% copies of each backup from every computer (4) in the house, every night. I change the drive about once a week. I have a three-point cycling system: #1) This week's backup, connected to one of the computers where a copy of each computers' backups are written; #2) Last week's backups, in the car; #3) Two-week-old backups, at the front door of the home; if I can't get to the garage, the front (or back) door is my next natural alternative.

When I was more actively engaged in business, I stored #2 in the local bank's "safe deposit box" in the vault, and #3 in the car trunk. Never had to test these options under "real fire" before, but I think it's a reasonable set of alternatives. Of course, all my essential records are digital, not on paper.

Re:I keep mine in the trunk of the car...

[AK Marc]

Bad idea. Storing spinning media in a car is a bad idea. The vibration can wear mechanical parts (yes, even if off and parked and all that). A bug SD card taped to the bottom of the ashtray would be untouched by thieves if the car were ever stolen and stripped, and would be unaffected by the vibrations. Just crack a window so you don't end up with 150+ temps in the car. I've seen CDs left on the dash melt in cars. Should be fine under the ashtray, but better safe.

Re:I keep mine in the trunk of the car...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most home fires start in the garage.

I'd recommend an 80 GB implant

[crispytwo]

I find that an implant that allows me to securely store data too sensitive for regular computer networks is the way to go.

https://allthetropes.orain.org...

Re:I'd recommend an 80 GB implant

[WorBlux]

But what if.... Shark ATTACK!!!!!11!!11!1!!2

Why make it overly complicated?

[hawguy]

To back up a few GB, why are you making it complicated?

First, if your home fire safe is not media rated, then don't count on any media surviving a fire, the firesafe may prevent paper from burning, but don't count on it keeping any electronic media from melting or degrading. And a fire safe is no guarantee, my sister lost her house and *everything* in it -- the only thing recognizable was part of a 100 year old cast iron stove, and the remains of the brick fireplace, everything else ended up in an unrecognizable pile of debris in what was left of the basement, there wasn't even enough left of their thousand dollar gun safe to be found in the debris.

A few GB is *nothing* -- just encrypt it and email it to yourself, set up multiple accounts with different email providers if you don't trust that Google will be around for the long haul.

If you had tens or hundreds of GB of data, then I'd say use a cloud provider and migrate your data to a new provider if that one goes out of business. I keep my data in Amazon Glacier -- for $10/month (it's mostly old family home videos converted to digital along with a lot of TIFF photos). If I needed to recover the data all at once, I could send them a hard drive (plus a fee) and they'd restore to that hard drive and mail it back to me.

The NSA Obviously:

[Hartree]

Just create a web site lauding ISIS (or the little green men in Ukraine, or the North Koreans, etc. There's a long list.).

You're guaranteed to have all your data backed up on the best quality archival storage the US government can find!

Just don't get too over the top. Predator drones, you know. ;)

Re:The NSA Obviously:

[Anonymous Coward]

And good luck getting it back if you had to restore it. A FOIA request *might* get it back, if you have enough money and lawyers and time.

Encrypt it then upload to the cloud

[Karganeth]

If it's encrypted properly it's basically impossible for anyone to break into it.

RAICS

[stox]

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Cloud Storage.

Store redundant copies on as many providers as necessary to provide the integrity desired.

Do it 21st century way

[chrysosphinx]

Instead of printing encrypted (and properly encoded) data on a sheet of paper, you could use a sheet of stainless steel and a laser cutter. Use a common scanner for reading.

Floor safe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Very fire resistant, and very secure. Nothing beats a floor safe. Insulated by earth and concrete, and able to put it in a fairly protected area which will survive even the most intense fires that may occur. Also, available onsite when needed.

a safe

[Orgasmatron]

You need a safe.

To be more specific, you need a water-resistant fire safe rated for digital media. Check the certifications and endorsements.

Talk to your local fire department. The temperature and duration ratings differ by safe, and you'll want to make sure that your house fire scenario matches the safe you are getting.

Also pay attention to water. Your safe may end up in the basement, and the basement may be full of water. You may decide to place the safe in the basement now, so that it doesn't experience a few hundred Gs getting there on its own.

Expect to pay $300 minimum for one. You'll be astonished by how big and heavy it is, and yet so small on the inside.

Oh, and from then on, you will have operational issues. You need to air it out from time to time, but you can't leave it open. Oh, and you can open it with a butter knife, or a stern glance, so don't put anything valuable in it.

same old question

[elmer at web-axis]

Physical backups are are a waste of time. Just keep everything digital and sync over the net. You can use encryption to ensure that everything is safe. Get yourself a 3 disk array, RAID it and put everything on it. Have the RAID array encrypt everything and sync it to 2 seperate cloud storage providers. If in the event that your local copy burns down you can pull copies from online storage. Otherwise it's at your finger tips whenever you need it. If you think that you must store it offsite make sure when you create the disks you setup parity files so if some of the files are corrupt you can recover. Par2 files work a treat for this.

Implant it ...

[MacTO]

Yeap, stick it under your skin. Five gigabytes isn't that much after all. It could easily fit on a uSD card, so you'll hardly even notice that it's there. If you happen to have an untimely demise in a house fire, it is no longer your concern. You can also be reasonably assured that the storage medium will melt when you combust, which further enhances the security.

Seriously though, decide upon your priorities. Your data is too important to store offsite. Yet it is too important to store onsite too. Which is it? If you decide to store it offsite, there are plenty of options that don't including storing it online. This includes placing it in a safety deposit box or giving it to a family member or longstanding friend. Just store the data on an SD card inside of an envelope, so that it can be filed away without being lost. Encryption will solve most of the trust issues. If something goes wrong on their end, such as them being a victim of a fire or burglary, remember that it is just a backup. You can create another backup to replace it.

Give "the cloud" a chance

[jds86930]

I have to disagree with everyone who is suggesting shipping physical copies offsite. They have the right idea -- a fireproof safe is about as failure prone of a strategy as there is, but I disagree with the premise that physical copies offsite is a better idea than using 'the cloud'. Offsite security isn't 100% unless it's a bank (and even then, it's like 99.999%), it's hard to keep up to date without a non-trivial time investment (will you go run a new copy to the bank every day?), it's error prone (did you remember to copy ALL the files), and it's prone to corruption (are today's DVD-R didn't have a burn defect?). Instead, I'd suggest something like this: 1) Use a cloud backup service, like Crashplan. Crashplan lets you encrypt your stuff before it's sent to their servers. They don't know the password -- that's on you. Several platforms work this way; Crashplan is just an example. 2) Put your files in an encrypted container -- something a TrueCrypt container. Save all your files in there. Have your backup service (ex- Crashplan) backup the encrypted container (don't directly backup the files within it). The initial upload of the container may take hours (maybe even days) for 5gb, but only incremental differences will be uploaded after that. Tell Crashplan to scan the file nightly for changes -- don't have it scan in 'real-time'. Now you have a backup platform that is encrypted twice, backed up offsite, and is kept up-to-date, and is relatively immune to corruption. You could layer on more security & encrypt the files within the TrueCrypt container (ex- NTFS EFS encryption). If this isn't enough for your security needs, then you better be storing some file about the JFK assassination on your computer.

Re:Give "the cloud" a chance

[Malc]

I've found TrueCrypt to be unreliable and slow, and totally fails if you have large files (e.g. I have some 70+ GB video files). Then again, cloud storage isn't practical/cost effective for a personal user when you're dealing TBs or even hundreds of GB of data.

Re:Give "the cloud" a chance

[dave420]

The guy's got a few GB to deal with. The cloud is the perfect solution - encrypt before you send, and you're sorted.

For the technically inclined

[Anonymous Coward]

Safe fire resistance works by filling the shell with plaster of Paris or similar gypsum-based material. During a fire the bound up water in that material phase-changes into steam (leaving the powdered gypsum base behind), soaking up the fire's heat and limiting internal temperature for a time. Anything stored in the safe will still be at or over the boiling point of water and may be steamed for the entire duration of the fire resistance rating.

cloud storage

[Xicor]

as far as safety from disaster goes, cloud storage is definitely the best solution.

Recovered IDE drive from a fire

[Latent Heat]

My father lost his workshop to fire in 1999. I have in my hands a Western Digital "Caviar" 2540 IDE drive that still reeks of smoke 16 years later. The computer was wrecked, but I hooked that drive up to an IDE cable and copied all of his files from it.

People think a fire turns everything to molton slag. There was much that survived even when the 2 cars in the garage were reduced to burnt hulks.

Don't have any experience with such a thing with modern multi-100 Gig drives, but traditionally drives were built like tanks.

Heavily encrypted and offsite

[Craig Ringer]

I think you're too focused on the risk of your backups being compromised. Do you store all your data only on encrypted hard drives with passphrases that you have to enter at boot time, on machines that auto-lock after a short timeout? If not, then you're probably at way more risk of data exposure through theft of "live" media and machines than backups, even stored offsite.

Not to mention the fact that a fire safe is a juicy target for Mr Burglar when you're away from home.

IMO the solution to the issue of cumbersome storage is to heavily encrypt, multiply duplicate and distribute your data.

I GPG-encrypt zip files, copy them to USB keys, and post the USB memory keys to my mother. Small USB keys are practically free now. She posts her backups to me too, along with outdated backup USB keys for re-use. This isn't all that frequent, so it serves for worst-case DR, but it has the handy effect of keeping old backups for quite a long time in case of accidental deletion not detected immediately etc.

I've also left an old laptop hard drive with photos with her, for example. Unencrypted because I don't much care if they get out, but it'd be easy enough to use an encrypted file system and store the keys elsewhere.

Key storage is the important part. Those keys must be in multiple places but stored fairly securely. If you lose the keys, your encrypted backups are worthless. A safe deposit box is an option, but it's kind of expensive and not necessarily as safe as you might like to think. I keep my GnuPG private in paper and electronic form in a couple of places, passphrase protected. Only I know the passphrase. So if I have a head injury when my house burns down I'm in trouble, but really, what else is there to do?

I also use SpiderOak for cloud sync of much of my data. Anything particularly interesting like key financial and identity records, passwords, etc, gets gpg-encrypted first. The rest is in the clear on my laptop, and I'm at much more risk of my laptop being stolen than of SpiderOak being compromised. SpiderOak offers versioning and deleted file tracking, which is very important, since many people's backup routines fail to properly account for files that are accidentally deleted/damaged at some unknown point older than the last backup rotation.

(I really should get a fire safe and run a spare SSD in there for up-to-date protection from more moderate incidents; that way I could real-time sync it from my laptop via the media PC.)

Re:Heavily encrypted and offsite

[rwa2]

Yep, this! Buy a hard disk for a trusted friend or relative, and rsync your stuff to their server periodically.

I've also started using AWS Glacier for backups of my raw photo archives. (Only the "good" processed photos get published to Google+, where no one really sees them, and maybe cross-posted to Facebook occasionally after some public event like a wedding or something).

Anyway, to upload stuff to Glacier I use the SAGU java client, which is relatively straightforward. It's something like 10 cents per GB per month, so I currently get a bill for 42 cents per month. I can live with that.

Every year or so I tar up the previous year's photos and upload them. Then I copy the manifest to Google Drive or some other thing. I gpg encrypt the sensitive stuff. The private key is on a USB drive in the fire safe, at some point I should get around to writing down the passphrase and tossing it in there too. I joke with my wife that if I get run over by a bus, I'll scrawl the passphrase next to my body in blood. She might be contacting some of y'all to help decipher the 133+5p34k characters, though.

Um, there are folks speaking Aramaic

[Latent Heat]

Isn't Copt or Syriac as spoken by Middle Eastern Christians tracing their geneologies to the First Century pretty much the same thing?

Educate yourself more on cloud options: Here's why

[harr2969]

Here's the thing you didn't address, which is harr2969's fundamental axiom of backups: if it isn't automated it doesn't happen. YOU MUST AUTOMATE.

For that reason, you need to place a bigger weight on cloud options. You listed a few specific issues with cloud. I believe there are easy and specific ways to address them. The tool I'll leverage for my answer is Crashplan, although others have suggested other tools.

Cloud Concern 1 - someone else is responsible for my data: Crashplan can be peer based. In that mode, you still have control of the data at your friend/family member's house.

Cloud Concern 2 - I could lose it to hackers: Crashplan can apply a backup-specific password on top of whatever standard file-level encryption you prefer for your personal data..

Cloud Concern 3 - The entity going out of business: The resources to run the program are on you, not on them with a peer based model.

Cloud Concern 4 - Once it leaves my home, I no longer fully control it, which is unacceptable: Peer-based, again, you're in control.

Cloud concern 5 - Cloud based costs $$: you didn't even mention this one, but the peer model is free.

Cloud concern 6 - harr2969 is a shill for Crashplan: Nope. It's a good program and I use it.

Heat insulation is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst case scenario your house will be on fire for only a couple of hours. Therefore, store your data on a SD card, put it into a small container with a bunch of metallic objects like coins which have high heat capacity. Then wrap the whole thing in a lot of fiberglass insulation that is fire retardant. Put it into a strong metal container. The temperature of your SD card will rise very slowly if there ever was a fire on the outside of the box.

Well now

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea that this was such a hot topic.

I lost 15 years. You are right. Listen up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yours is the most insightful comment here.

I _used_to_be_ (humbly and quietly in the background) a successful composer and musician, with five albums and a movie soundtrack in production at the time of my disaster. I lost about 60 thousand hours of work (not including the work of others, so roughly half a million man-hours in total).

1. My studio / house was burgled. This included analogue tape, every CD, every hard disk, etc.
2. I went to my offsite backup and picked up my backup disks.
3. I was then mugged on the way home (not related to the robbery).

My situation mirrored that of a victim of fire or flood.

To extend your advice: You need THREE OR MORE PHYSICAL BACKUPS in separate places. Leave them lying around in as many places as you can. A drawer, your parents' house, workplace, friends' places. Learn not to delete. Fill and store. Even stuff you think is bad. Put stuff on all sorts of media. When you fill a USB stick, put it somewhere else, spend 10 dollars and start a new one. The moment you think: "I should back this up", just grab it on a DVD and put it somewhere else again. Anything and everything.

My experience is that when you lose that much, even an old SIM with a few crusty mp3s of an old gig can make you cry with joy. The only data I had left was on those bits and pieces of junk left lying around various places. However it wasn't enough to rebuild.

If you don't follow this advice, you may, like me, lose your life, sanity and credibility. I am now 45 without a history. Not even a photo of my mum.

Bury a USB hard drive in the backyard...

[Anonymous Coward]

and get a really long USB cable

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It has been said. I will repeat.

[cfalcon]

You've said this is for backup purposes.

So what you need to do, is get truecrypt, cyphpershed, or veracrypt. Make a file big enough to hold your stuff, and put it in there.

Then back THAT file up to the cloud.

Without the password, they have a bunch of random data. You never give them the password, only using them as a remote storage device for a bunch of random 1s and 0s. If and when you want your data back, you bring back the big file, and then mount it- good to go.

Now, there are reasons to keep your stuff local, but you don't seem to have any of them.

For your list of concerns: a DVD backup is not going to have issues with water, but hot enough will destroy anything. I would personally consider a backup external hard drive, one local, one remote, encrypted as above if needed. If you are concerned about water, simply place the hard drive in something waterproof.

5GB on tape

[steak]

2500 C60 cassette tapes to be exact.

Had a fire--Here's what I did

[Forever Wondering]

I actually experienced the scenario you're talking about: fire in my apartment complex. Fortunately, nobody was hurt but several people lost all their possessions. Lucky for me, the fire only got within 90 feet of my place [while the fire was raging I was sweating bullets]. This was the one day I didn't have my laptop [which was my previous backup in case of fire] with me and I was out at the time.

I now use a 64GB USB stick that I carry on my keyring, so it's always with me. I also have one that's in the trunk of my car [under the spare tire].

Additionally, mailing the the USB stick to a family member or friend [one that you trust]. Also, get a safe deposit box. This can hold a full blown 4GB USB portable drive that can keep a lot more data. Because you stated that you only need 5GB or so, this makes the USB stick the ideal solution.

If you're paranoid, encrypt the backup.

Keep multiple disks of whatever variety and rotate them. That is, backup to disk A on Monday, disk B on Tuesday, etc. That way, if the actual backup process croaks the backup media (e.g. power failure during the backup), you still have other copies. This rotation also applies to trips to the safe deposit box and return mailings from your trusted friend with the older backup drives.

Of course, you can do the encryption yourself locally and send it to the cloud [as others have suggested]. Use multiple vendors in case one goes out of business. Actually, this may not work too well because of ISP datacaps and slow uplink speeds if you have a lot of data, not because of the cloud storage company per se.

go could, use encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

you can still use "the cloud", just encrypt it on your home PC using a strong encryption with a strong passphrase (aes256 will do) and only upload the encrypted contents to the cloud. At that point it doesn't matter if someone hacks it or it gets otherwise leaked.

Paper works

[femtoguy]

Seriously, paper is the most permanent thing that we know of. I did some consulting work with a long-term data storage company several years ago, and we found that no current data format is really stable for more than 5-10 years. Well, the one way that actually works is to make a metal CD master of your data, press a test CD, test it for data integrity, and then store the master. Metal stored correctly lasts indefinitely, and you can make a copy any time that you need it. Kind of expensive, though.
Having said that, the best advice is to print our you most important documents with on good quality acid-free paper with a good laser printer, and all of your picture with a good quality photo process printer. Then save those documents in your sealed fireproof safe. Truth is that most people don't really have that much truly archive quality data. Pick your couple of hundred pages of financial documents and personal/family stories, and your couple of hundred best pictures. That much is easy to store, and we have good readable paper documents from many of hundreds of years ago.

Spike it

[pubwvj]

Make a spike out of Sch80 PVC
Please trickle in lead low voltage wires for aux power
Batter in bottom
Solar on top to charge it
Airport WiFi for access with Time Capsule or the like
Big enough hard drive to hold everything you'll want.
Do it in RAID-wise with two drives incase one fails.
Use low energy drives so minimal heat.
Seal it all up so moisture stays out.
Bury it under ground with antenna out and cell.
Paranoid? Setup a second remote one.

Tape in a bank

[Jbcarpen]

My family all use tapes stored in safe deposit boxes. The same fire is highly unlikely to destroy both your house and your bank. (and even if it did, the boxes are typically stored in a fireproof room.)

Keep it with you

[bwcbwc]

Encrypt it hard, put it on a solid USB stick like the all-metal Kingston ones and put it on your keychain.

Or if you are worried about losing your keys or not being able to get to them when you evacuate, give it to a family member.

Off site backups are essential

[slincolne]

Many years ago I went to a presentation on Disaster Recovery. One of the classic stories told was of an accounting firm that kept their backups on-site in a fire proof safe (the best they could afford). One day there was a fire. The safe was perfectly intact, and showed no signs of any damage that would have resulted in the contents being damaged.

Unfortunately the Fire Department Standard Operating Procedure was that every fire was suspicious until proven otherwise, and the site was declared a crime scene. Consequently the Business was denied access to the site for several weeks until the situation was resolved and the remaining building could be made safe.

By that stage enough of their customers had moved to another accountancy firm and they were unable to survive with the remaining customers despite being able to completely rebuild their IT infrastructure.

I'd suggest in your example you may want to consider some form of removable media (5 GB will easily fit on a dual-layer DVD) and keep the backups in a secure safe at another family members house in case of disaster. With backups that size you could make several copies and keep them at multiple locations. Alternatively, encrypt the backups and keep a copy at work.

Thnk Multiples, as in...

[eyepeepackets]

...multiple copies in multiple places: It's the only way to be sure.

How good does it have to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your data storage plan doesn't have to be able to survive anything that would destroy the IRS (comet strike on the USA, supervolcano eruption, nuclear war), or, be secure against any opponent that could hack the IRS (Chinese or Russian government agencies). And tax data doesn't take up much space. So truecrypt or equivalent containers with an excellent password on two cloud services such as dropbox or onedrive, plus an encrypted blueray at work or a friends' house should be sufficient.

Local Bank

[Anonymous Coward]

Rent a safe deposit box at your local bank and drop in a new flash disk every year.

monolith

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously, no one went with monolith? structure that can survive an indeterminate number of geological eras. so secure, only 1 in 5 astronauts survive the attempt to crack it(and the one that does survive gets turned into a floating space baby). Although I guess it would with the lunar based access terminal, but I'm sure someone can pay the Chinese to hook up an internet connection to it when they get there.

preprocess first to overcome media/"cloud" issues

[Anonymous Coward]

If storing on dvd, and you actually want to ever see your data again, dvdisaster is a good choice. MO disks are pretty tough, DVDs and CDs, not so much.

dvdisaster - data loss/scratch/aging protection for CD/DVD media

Before storing in the "cloud" aka other people's computers, you can split the data up into n pieces, but only require m pieces to successfully re-assemble your data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
ssss - Shamir's secret sharing scheme implementation

And, of course encrypt the data first before doing anything else. Even openssl can be used to encrypt files.

(ssss and dvdisaster are in Debian's repositories)

Last thing is be sure you copy everything you really want to save. I had a wildfire take out my place a few years ago, and while I had a lot of stuff offsite, I did not realize how much I had overlooked until it was gone.

Multiple Copies

[MadX]

Multiple copies will probably be the best solution. Just like redundancy with storage involves multiple devices, your backup should simply be the same.
Tape storage is probably the better choice for long term "offline" data. So having 3 backups in different locations would probably give you the best ability to restore later on.

Backups

[millst]

the thing is, nothing that you can physically hold in your hand will ever be as secure and safe as an online option. say you spend $50,000 on a fireproof safe, multiple copies on flash disk, CD, paper, everything under the sun. its still not going to be as safe as sticking it in the cloud. the exact reason you list for saying you don't like cloud is why you should use cloud. "because once it leaves your property its out of your control" any solution that involves putting it on a physical medium and storing it on your property is not 100% safe. if you a paranoid, encrypt a file and store it on google drive. its not going to go away and it never will, google is not going to go out of business. and if you are ultra paranoid, store the same file on sky drive as well. you don't have access to the funds that these companies do that are required to keep digital storage safe, you would need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get in the same order of magnitude of safety as they can achieve.

BD-R incompatible with small from SDB

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of BD-Rs stored in a safe deep deposit box or over at a relative's house.

The small safe deposit boxes are too narrow for the common CD/DVD form factor. The smaller disks (originally a Sonly product) do fit, however these can only be used in a tray-type drive, not with slot-types.

Had a workshop fire last year

[spiritplumber]

Had a workshop fire last year and what did the job for me was having two drives (working copy, and a rolling backup done with SVN) on physically opposite sides of the workshop. If it's not a lot of stuff, just use USB sticks that are physically scattered around your place, one will survive.

what kind of financial docs are that big?

[Anonymous Coward]

really? several GB for taxes? I have a few pdf files and some various docs online. there's no way it's near 1 GB even uncompressed.
do you have a video of your tax papers?

The Cloud

[ljw1004]

The answer is still the cloud.

You're not vulnerable to hackers because you encrypted it before uploading it.

You're not vulnerable to the company going out of business because you still have your local machine. The only vulnerability is that the company goes unexpectedly out of business with no advance warning on the same day as your house is burned down. The great thing about two such radically different forms of storage (home + cloud) is that their failure models are uncorrelated and so vanishingly less likely to both fail at the same time.

Fireproof NAS

[SirMasterboy]

They make special NAS products that are designed to be fireproof and waterproof.

https://iosafe.com/products-2b...

Dig a hole in the back yard...

[David_Hart]

Just dig a hole in the back yard and place the USB key or whatever in a water tight container and fill it in. Encrypting it would be a good idea too, just in case the neighbors dog digs it up. For something simple, you could try an otterbox drybox. These are used for kayaking and diving and are waterproof. The only problem might be cracking during the winter. You might want to dig below the frost line or put insulation around it.

Another option would be to get an external shed and store stuff in there in a fire safe.

Re:Dig a hole in the back yard...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why dig? A USB-stick easily fits in a pipe, which can be conveniently hammered or drilled into the ground. If there's a risk of over-ground fire, the pipe should be of some low heat-conducting material, like the plastic ones used for sewage.

Re:Dig a hole in the back yard...

[mcmonkey]

Just dig a hole in the back yard and place the USB key or whatever in a water tight container and fill it in.

So basically the same as I've done with half my life savings. Should I take half my data to the track and put it on the dog that does his business just before the race as well?

Airtight container and bury it deep

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth/soil is a good insulator. Put whatever media you like into an airtight (and watertight) plastic container then bury it a couple of meters underground.

To make recovery easier bury a steel or concrete pipe vertically in the ground then place your container at the bottom of the pipe. Back fill the inside of the pipe with earth filled buckets that are the closest match to the pipes internal cross sectional area as possible. Then you can use a rope and hook to lift out the buckets one by one to expose your container.

This approach may have problems in an earthquake or if the area is prone to heavy flooding.

Easy, old 400MB Seagate drive

[Hamsterdan]

http://gizmodo.com/388465/char...

Seriously, as others mentioned, one home, one offsite in a bank security box. a portable external HDD will fit in the smallest ones for big backups, or a USB thumb drive/sd card..

Crashplan

[Leslie43]

5 gigs is nothing anymore.
As previously mentioned, you can just use a thumbstick, keep one on a keychain, another at work. Write a simple batch file to copy files quickly and easily... Problem is, that requires work. Any backup plan that requires the user to actually do something is bound to fail at some point.

This is why I like Crashplan. Yes, you can use their cloud (reasonably priced), but you can also just send encrypted files to any remote system(s) of your choice as well. The best part is that not only is it easy, It's free and works on most major OS. I setup a small "server" (old desktop with a big drive) in an office. In exchange for backing up their files to my home, I backup my files to their office. It even emails you updates and warnings if anything goes wrong. It's pretty much the best backup I've found for homes and small business.
.
I only backup necessary stuff though, anything I can afford to lose is backed up to a local drive.

mooron

[Anonymous Coward]

> I could loose it to hackers

mooron

Not in the fire

[Spazmania]

The most effective way for your data to survive a fire (or flood, tornado, lava, etc) is for it to not be in the fire. If you don't want to automate off-site backups then periodically drop a hard disk into a convenient bank safety deposit box.

Re: Not in the fire

[GrantRobertson]

This.

Re:Not in the fire

[Xest]

Yeah, just not one stored in Hatton Garden, London.

Re:Not in the fire

[cold fjord]

Agreed, a safe deposit box. But just about any medium will do: cd, dvd, tape, memory stick, hard disk, .....

A copy in the fire safe in addtion to the safe deposit box is even better. (I've see backup media eaten.)

Re:Not in the fire

[Kiaser Zohsay]

If it's not off-site, it's not a backup. It's just another copy.

Re:Not in the fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally true

Re:Not in the fire

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

If it's not off-site, it's not a backup. It's just another copy.

That seems overly reductionist. I'd guess that onsite backups adequately cover over 90% of data loss situations.

Re:Not in the fire

[Last_Available_Usern]

This is far and away the most safe, secure, and cost-effective option, especailly when you consider how many people already own safety deposity boxes. All your out at this point is the cost of two external drives to alternate (if you don't already have them) and the time it takes stop by the bank at a frequency your comfortable with.

Re:Not in the fire

[Anonymous Coward]

RaidZ2 (or RaidZ3) and snapshots adequately cover over 90% of data loss situations.

Re:Not in the fire

[sudon't]

I have to say, if you're worried about fire, (or even theft), you have to have an off-site backup. If it's only 5 GB of data, there's no reason you should worry about cloud backup if you encrypt the data before uploading. Just pick one of these giant companies that look like they'll be around a while, (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.). I doubt they'd pull the plug overnight anyway. You should have an opportunity to recover your data before that happens.
Another way would be to backup, or upload, to another remote machine of your own. Again, just encrypt it before sending it over the intertubes.

Re:Not in the fire

[drnb]

Agreed, a safe deposit box. But just about any medium will do: cd, dvd, tape, memory stick, hard disk, .....

A copy in the fire safe in addtion to the safe deposit box is even better. (I've see backup media eaten.)

CD/DVDs don't fit in the normal smaller safe deposit box. I use usb external drives, the capacity is a better match for my needs too. I have two such drives. Backup one drive, go to bank and swap drives, back up the other one. So I have one at home for convenience and one in the bank for disaster.

Re: Not in the fire

[Anonymous Coward]

You have encrypted data in the cloud, but where/how do you store the key to protect it from the fire?

Re:Not in the fire

[lsatenstein]

Just send your data out of the country, say to the north, where crime is low, and where houses and buildings are constructed with much stricter building codes related to fire, flooding and hurricanes. (Actually, can count on 1 hand the number of hurricanes to hit Canada in the past 5 years.

Re:Not in the fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Go Below the fire.... this idea depends on your structure configuration.... I have been a FF/Responder in times past, and one thing I have observed is that structures with a concrete floor have little or no damage to the concrete. Concrete gets hot, but not to the point of it cracking or breaking down.

Or even a Wood floor- does burn.. create a "vault" or storage area beneath the lowest point of your residence. Keeps your media below the highest areas of heat ( due to airflow/currents created by the fire itself as well as ventilation efforts when fighting a structure fire) while rooms get Seriously hot, the more extreme heat does not penetrate down that much.

If anything, would need to be waterproof, as water used to fight a fire will pool in the lowest points of a basement, foundation, etc...

my humble 2

Re:Not in the fire

[Spazmania]

Raid adequately covers hardware failure which is less than half of data loss situations.

Re:Not in the fire

[Spazmania]

And snapshots are expensive compared to incremental or differential backups.

Re: Not in the fire

[Spazmania]

Glove compartment. Buried in the back yard. Card in your wallet. Split up and hidden under a rock. In a desk drawer at work. Unlabeled and dissociated from the data you can store the key anywhere.

Re: Not in the fire

[afidel]

A combination of the back yard and wallet idea, have a solar powered rPi in the back yard with an SD card acting as a backup target, there are plenty of waterproof rPi cases and solar to USB panels.

Put your data

[Cafe Alpha]

into naked pics of celebrities and post it on 4chan. It will be around forever.

Experience

[Tablizer]

Just don't store it in Benghazi.

Oh man..

[multi io]

Store it on an encrypted disk that you keep elsewhere, outside your house.

PS: http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups...

"fireproof safe"

[Anonymous Coward]

As a volunteer firefighter for the past 7 years, I've helped retrieve over 10 "fireproof" safes after a fire. The fire dept has neat toys that allow you to open them easly after the dials are melted off. (read jaws of life)

Problem is, what might be fire proof, is not water proof. and we use LOTS of water to put the fire out. Have yet to open one that the contents weren't soaking wet.

This is not difficult.

[SuricouRaven]

I keep my backups offsite - at the house of a relative. I don't worry about security because I keep it encrypted, and I know enough about how to apply cryptography to be sure no-one is decrypting this without the passphrase - of which only one copy exists, memorised.

GB?

[someoneOtherThanMe]

Every year... a couple of GBs... of most important financial data? Who are you? Citibank?

The Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Encrypt it at your end, keep the private key save (on paper or whatever), and store the encrypted file in 2-3 independent and geographically distributed clouds.

Don't

[ledow]

Don't try to survive a fire. Your data won't. And if it does, you probably won't be allowed near it for a long time, and others might well come along and try to pillage things from the ashes if you live anywhere populated.

Avoid one fire/disaster from affecting your data completely instead.

I swap a disk with my brother every time we meet. If you didn't trust them not to read it (then why are you relying on them to store it?), you could just encrypt it.

Problem solved.

Hell, just rent a storage box somewhere and put an encrypted set of backups into it once every so often.

Though the chance of you surviving a fire is pretty low, the chances of two storage locations having simultaneous disasters such that you can't retrieve the second in time when the first has gone down, is even more miniscule. The more storage locations you add, the tinier the chances of absolute loss are.

It's a RAID. Think of it as a family-and-friends RAID if you must. And ensuring the chances of X simultaneous failures is so low that it's completely improbably is a damn sight better than trying to make a single fireproof disk.

On your keyring

[symes]

For only a few GBs? I have one of those tough memory sticks as a keyring for my car keys. On there I have a few encrypted containers that hold the stuff I would like immediate access to should disaster strike. Plus most valuable photos, etc.. This does not mitigate the daily backups to various locations, obviously. But I figure that if there is a disaster then I will mostly likely want to drive away from it and will have with me that really important stuff.

don't use safe, buy disaster recovery services

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, the safes are generally built to protect internal contents from catching fire. They don't protect enough from heat. The thing is that paper ignites at fahrenheit 451. Safes are built to protect paper for heating up to this temperature. Storage media gets corrupted at temperatures below Fahrenheit 451. If you put tapes, disks, money, jewelry and important paper documents in the safe, in case of fire the data stored in the safe will be destroyed.
If you can't put data on the cloud then I suggest that you try to find an ISP or a hosting provider that sells back up and disaster recovery services. They may be able to offer you some solutions that satisfy your needs.

Re:Bank safe deposit box

[TechyImmigrant]

Sewer pipe? Can I sftp to a sewer pipe?

Redundancy is key

[Anonymous Coward]

The key here is redundancy. Have several copies in an increasingly difficult to access but distributed sequence.

Keep a USB stick or two in your safe. They'll cope with accidental deletion or disc failure. They'll probably not survive a fire but that's what the later stages are for.

Encrypt the data and store it on Google drive, Dropbox and what ever other online free storage services you can find. The encryption prevents these services prying and if any one or even several of these goes belly up, it really doesn't matter since there are others.

Finally, store several encrypted USB sticks with friends and relatives. They won't be able to pry but the chance of losing data is minute at this point even if recovery involves an afternoon's conversation with someone you don't get on with :) When you need to update these revisions, donate the old sticks to the people hosting them.

It that isn't enough, bury each revision in a block of cement and add it to your garden. If you need to access, use a sledge hammer. Personally, I'd not go this far.

Have a friend

[e70838]

who will host the backup of your disk in his house.

Not only does Jesus save, ...

[Qbertino]

... he also does regular offsite backups.

And so should you.
Problem solved.

Bury it in an underground watertight safe.

[Xenna]

Create a watertight storage safe with - say - a Raspberry Pi and a bunch of USB disks. Connect it with power and ethernet wiring. Bury it six feet deep in your crawl space. Hope that the Raspberry SD card doesn't get corrupted.

It's "SAFE DEPOSIT BOX"

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop saying "Safety Deposit Box!" It's wrong and annoying.

Lame question

[Anonymous Coward]

5GB? Here's a hint. Put a copy out of your house on a dvd. If it's only 5GB, make 50 dvds of it and throw it all around your neighborhood. Spin up 2 VMs one at amazon one at rackspace and put them there.

I lose 5GB when I sneeze.

Sheesh. Helpless.

Why spend all this money ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Offsite.

And if you don't trust cloud providers:

BitTorrent Sync
Use a space on computers belonging to parents, siblings etc.
Or buy a "transporter" and lodge it in a friend's house.

http://www.filetransporter.com/for-individuals/

Off site stotage

[Anonymous Coward]

Encrypt it, put it on tape, rent a storage box.

You can get fire rated safes for magnetic media.

[nobby]

You can - at some expense - get fire rated safes that will protect magnetic media against a substantial fire. A small one is a few hundred pounds, although larger ones run into many thousands. You might consider a safe of this type.

Ceramic + Laser printed 2D barcode

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically, this combination should be unbeatable in durability, especially against fire.
Creating this will take a bit of time but if it's something that will not be changed (photo, etc.), it will last at least few thousand years.
All you need to do after creating this is simply dig a hole and bury (and avoid excessive water, such as marsh?).

Re:Bank safe deposit box

[amias]

apparently this is how republicans believe the internet was made

Offsite of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Get some cheap VPN/Dedicated server. Digital Ocean offers some really cheap VMs. You could also use Amazon EC2 and you could fire up the VMs that you own only when you need to access/update your data. Of course, since it all runs Linux, you can encrypt your whole partition drive. And encrypt the files that are sensitive to you. And it won't cost you much. This is truly the safest way. And I can guarantee you that Amazon will probably outlive us both. If you do this, and you use strong encryption, it might take that hacker a lifetime, if not more, to crack your files. It is truly the safest way. There are no fire-proof thumb drives or any storage media like that. I suppose you can pay few million bucks for a diamond print, which surely will survive lots of damage. That is if you find a company that does this sort of thing, but it is in no way a consumer grade tech.

MOLD is your enemy - no one will see this comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Home safe? MOLD is your enemy. Too bad there are a million comments and no one will ever see this. Home safes are fireproof because they're airtight and they easily get MOLD inside them.

"Somewhere Else"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe you're even asking this question, let alone that it made it to "story" status on Slashdot.

The best way to store data that it might survive a fire is to store it SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Concrete in hole in ground.

[Anonymous Coward]

A sonotube filled with cement and a slot buried in the ground takes care of the heat real good.
The slot houses usb flash on a wire for retrieval. Heat rises. Concrete in ground is stable.

Bit Torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Encrypt the files, zip them up, rename to some super nasty pron title, share on Bit Torrent.

You will have cloud backups until the end of time.

Use an airplane blackbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Aircraft blackboxes are designed to survive intense fires (and the house can fall on it as well, or a gas explosion can blow up your house). Buy one and modify it for your purposes

Or build something according to the design of blackboxes.Use the same storage technologies as aircraft blackboxes use.
A large amount of wax can be used as a heat sink, so melting the wax will maintain lower temperatures, if you build your own.

Brother-in-law

[Anonymous Coward]

I have two back-up HDs, one of which is stored, off-line, at my sister's house. I swap them weekly or so. She lives about 10KM away from me. I figure if a disaster affects us both at the same time, I've probably got bigger issues than losing my data.

Backing up...

[Anonymous Coward]

If security is not an issue - the obvious answer is just copy your data onto your mobile phone via Bluetooth.
If your house burns down - and your MOBILE also is in the fire, it's probably because YOU are in the fire.

Your tax status at that point becomes academic, usually.

bank

[Anonymous Coward]

Store whatever medium in a lock box at the bank as well as your own home.

Easy answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Create an encrypted virtual hard drive...have it sync to the cloud.

been doing it for a while now and works great.

If someone gets the virtual drive file...they would need to figure out a way to get into it...

Offsite

[EagleRider70]

Multiple copies in geo diverse locations is going to be the most reliable way to keep your data safe. So, a safe deposit box, in a location that is as far from your home as you can justify is your best option. Also, since it will not be under your direct control, you will want to make sure you encrypt it. As for archival media, I use Corsair Survivor USB sticks.

Seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't pay $20/month for a VPS, spend an hour configuring and disabling all unnecessary services/setting up iptables/your package manager du jour to automagically update, and can't deal with switching providers once every decade...

Your data is worthless to you anyway.

Shit in your home isn't safe, even if you live in a magical bunker.

off site storage

[Lord Dreamshaper]

bank safe deposit box. $60/yr. Perfect size for 3 NAS drives....so 9-12 TB and improving...back everything up quarterly, monthly, weekly...whatever you need. house burns down, you have your safe deposit box. bank burns down, create new copies from home for new bank. house and bank burn down? probably the apocalypse and you're not that worried about storage anymore

One option; git-annex + gpg

[TheCarp]

So you setup gpg, setup a key as normal.

Setup git-annex. It supports several backends, including rsync which works with rsync.net and an amazon options, and a few others. I only use ssh backends myself.

Anyway, you can setup some backends as encrypted backends and anything that goes there gets encrypted. It can only be read by someone with a clone of the original git repo and the gpg key to decrypt it. So you keep an encrypted copy of that seperately. Its much smaller, so you can keep many copies of it, its just index information.

Then after a disaster, you get a copy of the index/key, decrypt it, and have full access to your offsite cloud storage. You can even have multiple types of backend at different services. Hell if you have a friend who runs linux and doesn't mind you using some of his disk, you can use it as a remote.

Oh, and carry an encrypted clone of the index repo with you on a usb stick.

If the password/phrase is good you shouldn't need to worry too much. Learning to come up with decent enough passwords is pretty easy too. Everybody has their favorite methods, I like things with mnemonics, they work shockingly well, I could tell you with decent accuracy some root passwords we used for all of a few months at a job I left 10 years ago.

5GB!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Start with using a different fileformat! Then buy archive grade paper and a fireproof safe and use Optar.

http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/

ftp, of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it

-- uncle linus

Encrypted, cloud storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Encrypt the stuff and throw it up on the cloud, in addition to your current methods.

There is no substitute for off site storage, as many have pointed out. This is by far the easiest solution for that.

For the home user such as yourself, there is no reason to store physical media offsite.

9/11 True Story (Why you need offsite)

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine ran a business that was in a building _next to_ the twin towers (during 9/11) . They backed up every day to tapes, and the tapes were in a fire proof case.

When 9/11 happened they had to flee their building, and even though their building had no damage, they weren't allowed to get back into the building. After about 2 to 3 months, the government gave people access to the building to get their things (but only in a certain time window bunch of hours).

So they had perfectly fine tapes, in a fire proof container. They just couldn't get to them. If they had just taken 1 tape home from work one day they could have avoided this.

i do use the cloud...

[pointbeing]

...but encrypt everything I can't afford to lose with my own 2, 048 bit key. IM frequently less than HO encrypted cloud storage isn't secure unless you have control of the encryption key.

I keep the key on optical media in my house and a printed copy in a safe deposit box at the bank.

simpler offsite

[Chewbacon]

Put it on a portable drive, encrypt it and put it in a drawer/locker at work or family's house. No cloud required.

I encrypt my very important backups (pictures mostly, some documents and software development) and put them on Amazon S3. I also do the portable drive idea, but that is more like cold storage in case I get a nasty ransomware that finds all of my backups.

Here is slashdot

[allo]

People posting here should know such things by themselfs. Really, that's a stupid question, with two obvious answers

a) Cloud and encryption. Hey, 5 GB is nothing
b) give a usb stick to your mom. problem solved.

Offsite

[timmmaay]

Ultimately it depends on how much the data is worth to you when it comes to assessing how much you should spend on the solution. If you want to use a cloud provider then I would also look into the commercial inline encryption appliances (e.g. SafeNet) as then you control the visibility of the data in the cloud. If you want to spend a bit less then you could look into cheaper encryption options but again storing the data offsite is a must. Have you spoken to others in your industry that are facing the same challange? If so you might find a colo opportinuty that will keep costs down and be beneficial to both organisations. Obviously you still want to ensure the Integrity and Confidentiality of the data you store at the remote location but you have offsite storage and you could possibly negotiate a better deal for a mutually beneficial agreement then from a third party. Just food for thought.

use the "Cloud" and get over yourself.

[retchdog]

If you're worrying about which data storage medium would be most likely to survive a fire, you've already lost. It's about as stupid as getting a circumcision to avoid getting HIV.

Since you're asking Slashdot for advice, you can't be that big of a deal, which means you need to protect against idiot script kiddies and basically nothing else. Any meaningful adversary wouldn't hack you, but rather confront you through blackmail, seduction, or just plain old hitting you with a crowbar. If you are a big deal, or have ties to organized crime or other significant risks (just covering all the bases here), then what the hell are you asking here for? Hire a competent security professional; ask Slashdot for tips on finding one of those, if you must.

Now that this is established: what you do is you wad up your files with whatever you want (tar, zip, whatever you're comfortable with) and use AES (or CAST5, or whatever). Then, if you really want, you can etch the key into a big piece of steel or stone and put that in your safe. Using the alphabet {|, -, /, \} for ease of carving and to avoid ambiguity, you can represent it in 128 strokes. Assuming 2"x2" space for each one (including border), that's about 3.5 sqft, or ~5 sheets of steel in US Letter/A4 size. A more sane thing to do, might be to store copies of the key on paper in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory in the basement of one or more of your friends' or family's homes.

By the way, I find it hilarious that the same crowd which once would have told you to encrypt and store remotely is now tripping over itself to find ridiculous reasons not to, just because it's easy enough for anyone to do now.

The Juice of Sapho

[DarthVain]

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

Commit your taxes to memory twisted mentat!

Re:The Juice of Sapho

[retchdog]

wtf, I thought this comment would be about eating pussy, not the other kind of "Dune".

Re:Gigabytes, surely not?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Well I am pushing a couple hundred meg now of financial related data, but should probably start deleting things as I have close to 20 years worth of stuff. Granted this is for myself and my wife and includes, credit card statements, pay stubs, checking account statements, savings account statements, loan payment histories, multiple 401k statements, multiple 403b statements, IRA statements, other investment statements, tax documents, etc going back almost 20 years. Also I scanned in other important documents for each family member like birth certificates, social security cards, passports, driver license, marriage certificate, etc. so I have electronic copies of those as well. Then for good measure I also scanned in other documents of importance like car titles, bills of sale for firearms (they contain the serial number, who I purchased them from, and when I purchased them), insurance policies, wills, etc. As I said this is a few hundred megs but depending on what else one wants to backup like family photos or movies I could see it getting to a few gig pretty easily without being considered an obscene amount of data.

indeed, mesopotamia showed durability of clay

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, the information density isn't all that high. A 5x5 cm tablet of typical size might have a thousand cuneiform marks on it, each representing maybe 5-7 bits.

That means you will be building a large pile of clay tablets, and they'll get repurposed as road aggregate sooner or later.

Re:indeed, mesopotamia showed durability of clay

[davester666]

they won't if you pile them up in the shape of a pyramid. maybe also get a permit to allow yourself to be mummified and buried in the middle of it.

buckets of water in a house fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see.. this is how fire safes work: they have insulation that is wet, and the heat of vaporization keeps the temperature inside the safe below some threshold (200C?) while subject to some 1000C outside for some period of time.

BUT.. a bucket will not survive a typical house fire: there's a lot of mechanical forces that might make your bucket fall over, spilling the water, and while the steel won't vaporize, it will probably soften. Should you have used a 5 gallon poly bucket, it will be gone.

Furthermore it's not the temperature that's important, it's the heat transfer from the environment to the bucket. A house fire can put a lot more heat into your bucket than a stove can put into a pot: much stronger convection around the outside of the bucket means that more surface is exposed to more hotter air.

Off-site

[Kiaser Zohsay]

Once it leaves my home, I no longer fully control it, which is unacceptable.

Until it leaves your home, it's not really a backup, it's just another version. Finding a media to survive a fire is solving the wrong problem. The correct problem is to find a way for your data to survive a catastrophe that may or may not be of a type that you can guess before it happens, and the correct solution is off-site backups. Off-site does not imply cloud based, although cloud does qualify. A safe deposit box at a bank also works. Your grandmothers attic works. There are plenty of places that are outside your home but within your control.

Re:Bank safe deposit box

[mysidia]

As long as you have a sub-basement below the frost line; you could carve a narrow transport tube, with a larger holding area at the other end, and deposit additional capsules.

Retrieval is a harder problem, and you better make sure you choose non-combustible non-thermally conductive materials and a nice long plug for your transport tube.

Safety Deposit Box

[talldean]

Unless you have the world's most amazing fire safe or root cellar, you have three options that I see. First, easy: pick a drive that survives to zero degrees fahrenheit, and when you're not using it, put it in the freezer in your kitchen or garage. Most fires will kill it, but you'll get a bit more protection. Second, harder: pick a small drive, like a USB Key. Write it once a month or so. Store it in a safety deposit box at the bank, where only you have access. Storing something *in* your house that needs to be fireproof is nigh impossible. Storing it somewhere externally that's easily accessed and still secure is a problem you can solve with cash. Third, actually pretty trivial. Store it to *two* cloud providers, so if one goes out of business, you still have your data. Google Drive and Dropbox, for example. One trick; encrypt it locally before ever uploading it. Winzip (or Linux's zip) should both be able to produce and use strong AES-256 keys. Currently, the expected amount of time to get 50% odds of breaking AES-256 is exponentially more computers than currently exist running for the entire life of the universe, using suns as fuel. (With brute force, no one can do it, ever.) So the "someone will hack me" is up to you. The "two cloud providers" is probably what you want.

Photocopy, store in 2 separate locations

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes simple is best...

Use a bank

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it HAVE to be at home? I keep two backup copies on MicroSD cards, one at home in a standard (fairly cheap) firesafe, and the other set in a safe deposit box at the local bank. Ideally (according to the backup "experts") one set should be in an entirely different city (in case of a natural disaster), but my data isn't critically important. If the city I live in gets flooded or burns to the ground I probably won't be in a position to care about my digital family photos.

$50/yr safe deposit box and external hard drive...

[AcquaCow]

That's how I do it at least...

Redundancy

[radish]

You need multiple copies. Stick a BD is the safe, another at a local bank and upload to an offsite backup company like crashplan or even plain S3. All of these have failure modes, but the likelihood of them all failing at the same time is miniscule.

Re:Bank safe deposit box

[TechyImmigrant]

I'll stick with cloud and local backups thanks.

The cloud...

[Anonymous Coward]

In a rainy day.

A former Firefighter chimes in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Former Firefighter chiming in here...

The above post about differences between Fire Safes and Media Fire Safes is good. I use a small media safe inside my larger semi custom made Gun Safe.

The location of your home and the location of your safe inside the home matter as well. Your home being within a 5 minute response time zone of the local full-time fire department is one thing; being a 25 minute response time away is another. Your safe being near an outside wall of your home with minimal fire loading around it is one thing; being in the middle of your home with lots of fuel around it is another. Also what fire detection and fire suppression systems do you have in your house?

So, how long will the media need to be below the specified storage temperature while a fire burns around it?

Italian job?

[Anonymous Coward]

what is this Italian job everyone is talking about? Are high tech companies in Rome offering off site storage in secure facilities?

For a measly few GB..

[Anonymous Coward]

A few GB will easily fit on a flash drive. Buy a bunch, copy your data to them, and keep at least one in your pocket at all times. In your pajama pocket too if you think you might be too hurried to put your pants on in a nighttime fire. Keep one in your drawer at work (if you don't work from home) and maybe your car glove compartment too (might want to check that one frequently, it can get hot).

Or as many others have suggested, keep it in a safe deposit box at a bank.

either micro-sd cards or

[unami]

a small usb-stick - because they got the least amount of plastic that could warp. put them in a vacuum flask, so they are nicely insulated.

Encrypt or publish

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't encrypt, you're publishing.

Cf the fappening.

So, use the cloud, but only put noise up there.

Re:Offsite - Love it!

[careysb]

Off-Galaxy

Lo-Tek concrete in the ground.

[Tristao]

1 - Dig a hole in the ground.
2 - Lay some concrete on the bottom.
3 - Place a concrete pipe vertically over that.
4 - Cover it with a brick/lid and let it rest for a day.
5 - Cover your hole with dirt.
6 - Lift your lid and drop whatever media you want inside.

On your person

[Mirvnillith]

Assuming a large enough SD or USB, why not just keep the backup on your person? As safe as your are and readily available. If your wallet isn't good enough, get something for your key chain, a wrist band with a pocket or perhaps a pendant?

Colocation

[YumYumClownMonkey]

You're approaching this all wrong, thinking you need a storage medium that's heat-resistant, when we don't even know if such a thing exists. (At least for consumer media, like disks and tape and hard drives.) And the answer is much simpler: Get a safety deposit box at your bank, make a copy of everything in your safe and put it in the safety deposit box. Your bank is EXTREMELY resistant to fires at your home.

House fires are incredibly rare.

[rahvin112]

I'm not sure of the exact odds but I would put a house fire at around the odds of being struck by lighting. It's going to vary based on how old your house is and the age of it's electrical system but house fires are extremely rare.

Onsite but different out building?

[potscott]

Do you have a shed or detached garage? I have detached garage that I ran connectivity to using a 100mpbs full duplex ~$40 tplink power line adapter. In the garage I have a ddwrt router for extending wifi and an old PC for garage tunes, IPTV (hdhomerun), user manuals for car wrenching; and perfect for an outside the house rsync of critical docs (single truecrypt container).

Fire Foam

[WillgasM]

Suspend an SSD by the cable in a bucket and then spray the whole thing full of quickfoam to make a watertight seal. Then bury the bucket in the backyard with the cable exposed. Cover it with a junction box and get one of those industrial Ethernet USB extenders. Then run a conduit and CAT6 into your house. Surely your house fire won't penetrate even a few feet of dirt. Now I bet you feel silly for asking when the answer was so obvious.

Stone tablets.

[blang]

Sorry, but your neurotic requirements leaves no other option.

Alternatively, take some happy pills, learn about encryption, and store it at multiple online facitlities.

Clay tablets

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say clay tablets as well.. Some of those have survived thousands of years... And actually burning them improves their properties...

just wondering if our current new knowledge output would be put on clay tables how many would one need...

Granny had this

[Anonymous Coward]

back up to any medium you like. find a can large enough to hold the medium. Insert medium any bury container in the back yard. All done...........

Anal-retentive storage habits

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been a great article for Cloud-to-Butt extension users

Fireproof safe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fireproof safe (and whatever medium you prefer). Has the additional benefit of keeping your valuables safe from other things as well.

Rethink safe location

[Anonymous Coward]

Put the data on any media you want, but install the safe in the ground. Dig a small hole in the back yard, pour concrete, and embed a safe oriented with the door facing up. For an additional half day of work and maybe $20 in cement mix you now have a fire safe that is truly fire-safe that will definitely survive your house burning down. Stick a plate or a garden shed over it. Get one with a decent water-proof seal, and maybe wax the door edge.

Off-site

[Anonymous Coward]

It may not be the answer you want to hear, but nothing on-site is going to survive all possible disasters (fire, flood, earthquake, thieves, etc...)

An on-site offline backup in a sage is a great first step.

Then you want a secondary off-site backup too, and the easiest and most convenient way to do that securely is to encrypt the data yourself and then store t with a cloud provider. If the provider goes bust or loses it, no problem, you use your other backup and pick another provider.

Two drives, swap them out

[drnb]

Personally I suggest 2 usb external hard drives. One in the home media-rated fire/water safe and one in the bank safe deposit box. Swapping out the drives periodically.

Do a backup to the current home drive. Take it to the bank and swap drives. Do a second backup to the drive you brought home from the bank and put it in the home safe. Both drives in both locations are now current.

I end up doing this about 3 or 4 times a year. Had one drive go bad in the last 5 years, just bought a replacement and continued on.

And of course I have an external RAID box for my daily backups and non-fire related disasters.

Safe in hole under house, distant offsite storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Dig a hole in the floor of your basement. Make the hole wide enough for you to open your fire-resistant safe easily, and deep enough to protect the safe from the heat of the house being on fire. Put some insulation above the safe (between the safe and your house), to give it extra protection from a house fire. Attach the safe securely to your house's foundation, so that if a burglar tried to carry away your safe, detaching the safe would make noise and take time.

Now encrypt and password-protect your data, and put the flash drive (or whatever) into the safe. It should be safe from fire now.

I recommend that you also send your encrypted and password-protected data to an offsite storage company. (Or to your parents' home.) Make sure that the offsite storage is 1) in an area in which you feel comfortable putting your data, and 2) at least 500 miles away from you. If a hurricane, earthquake, massive flood, etc. hits your house, you don't want that disaster to also hit the place where your data is stored offsite.

Self explanitory...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are that concerned about your data retention, use two separate automatic cloud backup services. Its so beyond unlikely that a disaster could strike your home, and both of the data centers simultaneously that its no longer worth worrying about. Now, data privacy, that is a completely different story. If you want both privacy and security, get a massive flash drive or portable HD *ideally both*, keep them in a sealed baggie in a bank safety deposit box. Bank vaults are fireproof and secure.

Regular Harddrive

[cwsumner]

The short and easy answer is a regular harddrive. The magnetic patterns will usually survive, even if the electronics do not. There are recovery services that can get the data back, who you don't have to pay unless there is a fire.

But of course the best answer is "off site", like they said. Just putting a flash drive in your car might be enough, although not as secure from theft.

A lot depends on what you concern is. Like which is more important, recovering the data or securing it from theft? What locations can you have reliable access to? How often do you need to refresh it?

Also, how long does it have to last? If that is a long time, many types of media will be obsolete and not readable on new computers. In that case you might have to also store a computer with it, or at least the necessary drive.

Use a good thermos

[iMactheKnife]

Put your data on SD chips, more than one chip in case there are errors, in a decent metal/glass vacuum thermos bottle in your fire-proof safe. Bury another thermos bottle in your back yard. One of them will survive.

Bank Safe Deposit Box

[peterofoz]

Banks offer safe deposit boxes where you can safely store media as a flash drive, cd, or even a small disk drive. Use an offsize rotating backup schedule of 3 devices to ensure you always have one in the safe.

You answered it yourself, In the cloud

[bobjr94]

Get a dropbox account. Store it online, make a secure password. Or buy a TB usb3 drive, encrypt your data, copy your data and take it with you and keep it at a 2nd location. Dont burn a bunch of dvd's to lock up in a firebox, that was good in 2003.