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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

I'm inclined to write off (anyone using a WD "My Book" device) as beyond help but a simple SFTP client like WinSCP or Cyberduck or Filezilla is comprehensible to just about everyone.

You drag and drop to the SFTP destination[1] which covers "History"[2] with immutable ZFS snapshots and "Integrity"[3] with ZFS itself and "Security"[4] by running nothing but OpenSSH.

If you're going to set your parents up with something, you could do worse than that ...

[1] https://www.rsync.net/products/sftp.html

[2] http://taobackup.com/history.html

[3] http://taobackup.com/integrity.html

[4] http://taobackup.com/security.html

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> comprehensible to just about everyone

Are you forgetting the recent post about how kids these days don't even have any concept of files? You're over-estimating most people in their technical competence and the required level of understanding and patience needed to do anything with SFTP. You say "drag and drop" and I think of the hours of troubleshooting and explaining (and re-explaining) I'd have to do if I were to try to implement this with family.

A "backup plan" which involves manually copying files around is no plan at all. It's basically guaranteed to fail when you forget to copy the files for a while, or when you give up on it because it takes too long.

I backup to cloud (b2, scripts that wrap their CLI tools), but there are lots of reasons to prefer backing up to devices they physically own.

I do both: I backup to my Synology NAS, which then in-turn uses Synology's Hyper-Backup (which is very nice, btw) to my Azure storage account - costs me about $15/mo to store a few terabytes with PITR recovery back to when I started doing this in 2018.

The thing is... I can't help but worry someone's going to compromise my NAS and DBAN the drives and then extract the Azure storage key and use that to delete all my backup blobs...

(Yes, the backup client needs read, write, and delete permissions, unfortunately - and Azure doesn't offer a Blockchain-style "append-only" mode for blob storage, unfortunately - still, better than nothing).

UPDATE: Apparently Azure Blob Storage does support strict append-only blobs that cannot be mutated or deleted, only appended - so I wonder if Hyper-Backup can use that…

What’s your threat model?

Is there anyone out there with $$$$ who will stop at nothing to part you, a rando, from your old data? Probably not. Are there sophisticated attackers who will burn a couple 0-days to build a botnet for the sole purpose of randsoming NASes AND attached cloud accounts AND the origin systems, accounting for tons of possible configurations? Still pretty unlikely — this is NotPetya level stuff with small payoff.

If you find yourself in the crosshairs of a sophisticated, dedicated attacker (perhaps one in possession of a 0-day), you’re pretty much done. Offline write-only backups stored offsite are the only defense.

However, is there a bug lurking in Hyper-backup that might accidentally wipe stuff from Azure storage, and the bug hits a month before your house gets struck by lightning? Maybe…

> However, is there a bug lurking in Hyper-backup that might accidentally wipe stuff from Azure storage, and the bug hits a month before your house gets struck by lightning? Maybe…

Brb calling my psychiatrist for more xanax

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