[Civil] Protecting/fixing your computer

[The Mad Monk]

Yes, but this is Marketing.

[loinburger]

Supplement to backups:

In general there are two ways to back up your data: cloud storage, or a local external hard drive. The former is slower and you pay through the nose if you're backing up more than around 50gb of data (see below about getting 50gb of free storage on ADrive), while the latter is potentially less secure because if a criminal steals your computer or a fire destroys your computer or whatever then that same criminal/fire might steal/destroy your external hard drive(s).

1. ADrive gives you 50GB of free cloud storage - I use this to keep a backup of my documents (about 4GB) and an image of my system drive (about 30GB). I don't recommend that you trust the security of any cloud storage services - it's probably not likely that they're going to read your data, but there's no way for you to verify that they're encrypting their hard drives and these might be stolen or disposed of incorrectly. Before uploading anything potentially sensitive to cloud storage I compress+encrypt it with 7Zip - choose the 7-zip file format, enter a password, and check the "encrypt file names" box (you can also encrypt using the zip format, but this won't let you encrypt file names, it offers the unsecure zipcrypto encryption option in addition to the secure AES encryption option whereas the 7-zip format only offers the AES option, and it might trick you into thinking that you can open the file from anywhere when in fact a lot of zip programs don't support AES encryption). The free version of ADrive has a max upload size of either 1 or 2 GB (I forget which), so when compressing/encrypting a large file/folder you should split it into 650mb or 700mb chunks.

2. It's not convenient to keep encrypting working documents and uploading them to ADrive, so I use BoxCryptor in conjunction with Google Drive for sensitive working documents - encryption and synchronization are transparent. Note that you won't be able to access the encrypted document via your browser (at least not using the free version of BoxCryptor) like you would an ordinary Google Drive file. Also, you can only have BoxCryptor installed on two computers if you're using the free version (you can still access the unencrypted Google Drive files from a computer without BoxCryptor installed).

3. I use a QNAP NAS to store most of my stuff, and I back this up to encrypted (using DiskCryptor) external hard drives once or twice a month and then store the hard drives in a safe deposit box.

4. If you want to back up tons upon tons of data to the cloud, then AFAIK Amazon Glacier is the cheapest way to go. Note that this is really only appropriate for disaster recovery, because Amazon keeps costs down by taking most of their hard drives offline unless needed and so it can take over an hour for them to start a file transfer to you.

Supplement to passwords:

7-zip and Laspass allow for unlimited length passwords, which are then hashed to transform them into the encryption key. I suggest using a long phrase that has some unusual words in it so that it's resistant to a dictionary attack, for example a stanza from Jabberwocky or something along those liines. If you're using Lastpass (and I highly recommend that you use Laspass) then have it generate passwords that are at least 12 characters in length.

[N35t0r]

Thanks for all of this I want to start taking more measures to protect/secure data as I start handling more sensitive information in the future.

RE antivirus programs, what is your opinion on MS security essentials?


[edit:] Also, SSDs on a NAS? Isn't that overkill?

[loinburger]

MS Security Essentials is good, it consistently gets rated 4/5 or 5/5 in antivirus reviews along with Avast and AVG. I tried it out awhile back and it didn't seem to have any impact to system performance.

The only antivirus program that gets rated decently that I would NOT recommend is Avira, because it's got an awful nag screen.

And yeah, an SSD on a NAS would be overkill, I use magnetic disks - my NAS has two 2tb disks, which would cost a small fortune if they were SSDs. With my magnetic disks I suspect that the network is the bottleneck, with SSDs it would definitely be the bottleneck unless you're stringing a lot of high quality wires all over the place (whereas I use 802.11n).

Which reminds me: I consider RAID to be mostly a waste of time for a home user, it's a good high availability solution for businesses but it doesn't hold a candle to true backups. If I had six or more disks in my NAS then I'd probably use a RAID-5 configuration, but with two disks I'm limited to RAID-0 (which is a waste of time because the network is probably the bottleneck) or RAID-1 (which is basically just wasting a disk since I'm performing backups anyway).