Data Safety In a Time of Natural Disasters

CowboyRobot writes "The National Weather Service has begun testing the way it labels natural disasters. It's hoping that the new warnings, which include words like 'catastrophic,' 'complete devastation likely,' and 'unsurvivable,' will make people more likely to take action to save their lives. But what about their digital lives? Recommendations include: Keep all electronics out of basements and off the floor; Unplug your hardware; Buy a surge protector; Enclose anything valuable in plastic. If the National Weather Service issued a 'complete devastation' warning today, would your data be ready?"

Mutual backup.

[SuricouRaven]

Encrypt your stuff, send to a friend elsewhere in the world. He can likewise encrypt his stuff and send to you. Doesn't even need any fancy cryptographic stuff - even the non-techies can set a password on a winrar archive, and winrar's crypto is sufficiently hard to break that the only way I've ever found is to brute-force the password - which still is very slow, due to the use of a multi-round hardened hash.

HDD Cage

[Aereus]

If I had to physically escape with my data, it would take less than a minute. Pull off the side-panel to my case. Unplug my HDDs and pull the cage they're attached to. Toss that into a bag, or if time wasn't critical, look into safer solutions like anti-static bags or at least a freezer ziplock or something.

Anything else in the system is easily replaceable in a disaster.

Re:Mutual backup.

[TooMuchToDo]

$10-20/month to Dropbox vs how many hours setting up SparkleShare, worrying about hosting it yourself, etc?

Hell, if you're super cheap, buy space from Google and shove it all into Google Docs (yeah, theres an API). $5 for 20GB of storage or $20 for 80GB of storage (per YEAR).

This is an easy one.

[zippo01]

http://www.pelican-case.com/ [pelican-case.com] If you break it they replace it. They are awesome and water proof cases. Just build you system inside, something happens, close the door. Done.

Here's a thought...

[Gordonjcp]

... try not building your house in an area prone to hurricanes. Or, if you're going to do that, try not living in a house constructed along the same basic design as a plywood packing crate.

Most of the houses in the US would simply not be passed as fit for human habitation in the UK, because of their shoddy thin-crappy-wood-over-thin-crappy-frame construction.

Re:Clouds

[unixisc]

Actually, this is one of the few advantages of having things in the cloud. I'd assume that the storage is all distributed and mirrored.

Re:Clouds

[kaladorn]

The cloud is a good way to store things (encrypted by yourself before storage) but is only one part of a broader data security and integrity effort.

Where I am, in an apartment, I'm immune to a flood (but not a burst waterpipe). I'm defended against surges of moderate scope by UPSes and surge suppressors. I have a reasonable degree of data replication to protect my data from hardware failures and I have limited off-site replication of data to protect me from catastrophic events like fire, serious water pipe issues, earthquake, etc.

But these sorts of strategies have a cost-benefit issue; You pay for offiste storage generally and if you want to store tens or hundreds of gigs of data, that gets pricey.

Offsite storage also puts your data into the hands of others. Even encrypted, you have to assess there is a degree of security risk in having your data store externally.

Security and data protection has to be scaled to the need and you have to think about both the threats and the costs involved in any plan you choose.

Still, it is nice there are more options now than there used to be and Amazon and other cloud storage options are handy.

I have a buddy who has to travel to the US but with the later-day border issues, doesn't like to take a laptop. So he stores an encrypted version of his code repo in the cloud and just rents a laptop while in the US, unpacks his repo, does his thing, cleans and wipes the laptop, and returns it when he's headed home. That sort of capability avoids DHS taking a copy of his work. His concern isn't them reading it, so much as them having piss-poor data security of their own and not being able to know where it might end up.