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Comment by alexggordon | Hacker News Reader

Replying to my own comment, because I'm out of the edit time-range and this kind of blew up.

If I had to point the discussion of this comment, I'd point it away from what I did wrong personally (I know I f*cked up in probably more than one way).

What I learned from this is that there are no situations in which I would personally host a file server of this feature level and control over my documents. I think "all in one" (dropbox/backup/encryption/sharing/file storage) personal solutions like Owncloud try to do too much, and end up with some seriously rough edges that can turn off very large portions of their user base.

I guess the question I raise is, given my experience "can you prove to me that I can absolutely trust you with all my data"?

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This is why you want client side encrypted clients who treat your NAS/Cloud Account/HDD as dumb storage. This way it's easy to immediately verify on your client computer that entire CRUD cycle works fine, and continues to work fine.

It also allows you to have simple redundancy, so if your NAS setup fucks up, the cloud account and external hard drive version is still there.

I dump GPG and Truecrypt files right into my 1TB Dropbox folder. Works fine, $10/month. I'd never go back to managing my own NAS locally.

Have you tried out dropbox infinite yet with that setup?

Not yet, although its on my TODO list.

I do something similar too, but I have around 1TB of data, so a full restoration will be painful. Remembering to plug in an external hard drive is irritating so I want to get a NAS that my laptop auto connects to, like time machine. What do you think?

Time Machine would work. Backblaze.com is an option as well ($5/month for unlimited storage, they'll backup an external drive) if you're looking for offsite backups.

Exactly this.

If anyone is interested in client side encryption, checkout my project securefs (https://github.com/netheril96/securefs). It is better than TrueCrypt as its encryption is randomized and authenticated, hence more secure, and it does not require preallocation of storage space.

Why not GPG. Or a loopback device with dm-crypt (LUKS)?

GPG is not transparent. And its symmetric encryption is not authenticated. Neither is dm-crypt's.

> I guess the question I raise is, given my experience "can you prove to me that I can absolutely trust you with all my data"?

But the answer to that is "no". All of the time. No matter who you are asking it about. There is always the possibility of someone - no matter how much you trust them or pay them - screwing up your data. Including yourself.

>There is always the possibility of someone - no matter how much you trust them or pay them - screwing up your data. Including yourself.

Especially yourself. I trust a product with dedicated administrators who do nothing but keep people's data safe to do a much better job than i could ever do myself. I don't want that kind of responsibility when google and dropbox are willing to do it for me for a couple bucks a month.

Yeah, pretty much summarizes my fears with Owncloud. Not only that, but as mentioned before, I no longer have any desire to manage my own large scale storage (NAS/Raid, really anything), so that compounds my own fears with Owncloud.

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