Storing information very securely

[drew einhorn]

There's 2 parts to your question.

1) Reliable (lasts for years).

Anything can fail at any time.  Your best defense is to have multiple
copies in different locations.  What if there is a fire, flood, tornado,
hurricane, or operator error?

2) Secure

In most cases some form of encryption is the answer.  LUKS suggested
earlier in the thread is often an excellent choice.  Especially if the data
changes frequently.  But an encrypted device makes disaster recovery more
difficult, if not impossible, impacting reliability.  How frequently does
the data change?

Who are you protecting the data from?  What is the value of the data?
Unless the data is extremely valuable, nobody will take the trouble to
overcome even the simplest protections.  Unless, there are personal issues:
 a bitter divorce, or feud. etc., where someone wants to access the data to
hurt you.

In my case.  I mirror all my drives, to protect from drive failures,
 combined with a filesystem on a TrueCrypt container in a data file in the
cloud (Dropbox).

I know about the issues with TrueCrypt
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt> and Dropbox.  TrueCrypt adds
another encryption layer to address the Dropbox poor encryption issues.
TrueCrypt appeared to be the best solution at the time I set it up.  My
data is not all that valuable, and it hasn't been worth the trouble to
change it.  Folks are working on the TrueCrypt issues, and there are now
alternatives: CipherShed <https://ciphershed.org/>, and VeraCrypt
<https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/> are both forks of the TrueCrypt code.

CipherShed is compatible with TrueCrypt containers.  Veracrypt is closer to
an official release.  Veracrypt claims to be more secure, but you need to
be a crypto expert to understand the discussion.

As far as I know Dropbox is the only cloud provider with decent Linux
support.


On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 7:00 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2 December 2014 at 13:26, Don Parsons <dfp10 at verizon.net> wrote:
> > Hello,
> > What is the most reliable and secure storage device (external hard drive
> or
> > other) for securing a few files with summaries of personal information?
> > I don't trust flash drives.
>
> What do you mean by secure?
>
> Colin
>
> --
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
>



-- 
Drew Einhorn

"You can see a lot by just looking."
  --  Yogi Berra
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20141202/2710124b/attachment.html>