UrBackup is an easy to setup Open Source client/server backup system, that through a combination of image and file backups accomplishes both data safety and a fast restoration time.

File and image backups are made while the system is running without interrupting current processes.

UrBackup also continuously watches folders you want backed up in order to quickly find differences to previous backups. Because of that, incremental file backups are really fast.

Your files can be restored through the web interface, via the client or the Windows Explorer while the backups of drive volumes can be restored with a bootable CD or USB-Stick (bare metal restore).

A web interface makes setting up your own backup server really easy. For a quick impression please look at the screenshots here.

You may access the account with any tool that runs over SSH - not just restic.

You may create and maintain an unlimited number of restic repositories.

You have full control over your authorized_keys file to restrict IP and command access - or to enforce append-only mode.

You may configure custom alerts to generate email, SMS, or Pushover warnings - or call a webhook. Or all of the above.

You may set your account to be immutable (read-only) and accessible only by SSH key (disabled passwords).

We maintain the latest, stable release of restic on our servers.

Special Pricing for restic Accounts

Special "restic accounts" are available at a very deep discount for technically proficient users.

restic is a program that does backups right. The design goals are:

• Easy: Doing backups should be a frictionless process, otherwise you are tempted to skip it. Restic should be easy to configure and use, so that in the unlikely event of a data loss you can just restore it. Likewise, restoring data should not be complicated.

• Fast: Backing up your data with restic should only be limited by your network or hard disk bandwidth so that you can backup your files every day. Nobody does backups if it takes too much time. Restoring backups should only transfer data that is needed for the files that are to be restored, so that this process is also fast.

• Verifiable: Much more important than backup is restore, so restic enables you to easily verify that all data can be restored.

• Secure: Restic uses cryptography to guarantee confidentiality and integrity of your data. The location where the backup data is stored is assumed to be an untrusted environment (e.g. a shared space where others like system administrators are able to access your backups). Restic is built to secure your data against such attackers, by encrypting it with AES-256 in counter mode and authenticating it using Poly1305-AES.

• Efficient: With the growth of data, additional snapshots should only take the storage of the actual increment. Even more, duplicate data should be de-duplicated before it is actually written to the storage backend to save precious backup space.

• Free: restic is free software and licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License and actively developed on GitHub.

Let us begin with the sincere hope that you do
not have an early demise.

On the other hand, what if you did have a fatal
car accident today? Would your business partner
or mate know how to access critical accounts,
including your on-line banking and brokerage
accounts? Or, would your family know what to
do with your email, facebook, or other web
access points?

The smart solution is to ensure that your key
accounts and passwords are located in the same
place your Will and Power of Attorney docu-
ments are stored. In fact, a complete listing of
all your accounts and policies will aid your fam-
ily in the event you are incapacitated or die.

For sensitive materials, including your financial
accounts, nominate someone you truly trust,
include them in your Will or Power of Attorney,
and make sure they know where to find the
information if needed. Also, check with the
institution to ensure the paperwork is in order to
allow them access without major legal gymnast-
ics (often, this means a “joint account with right
of survivorship”).

For most people, the best solution is to leave a
sealed envelope with a trusted person (family
attorney or your best friend?), to be opened only
in case of death. (You will need to update such a
letter every so often as you change passwords
and/or accounts.)

Even if you have saved your data files to a hard
drive, you still have to be cautious – any IT pro
will tell you the only question about hard drive
failure is when it will happen, not if!

BACKUP OPTIONS
That is the key reason why it is important to
backup the backup.

Possibly you have heard of the 3-2-1 Backup
Rule: have three copies of anything important,
in two different formats (hard drive, solid state
drive, CD, DVD, etc), with one of the copies at
another location, away from your site.

This is good advice, and exactly where you keep
the backup is important.

Why? Just think for a moment about the fires in
California, or the flooding caused by Hurricane
Sandy in the Northeast, or that in the Carolina’s
last year.

If critical backups were merely located in a
different office in the same building, or at a
neighboring site, there would be a great chance
that any such backups would be destroyed, too.
And not only the business data – family records
and pictures easily could be destroyed.

DO NOT LEAVE
WITH YOUR PASSWORDS
By Gil Gillivan

Great piece on not dying with your passwords.

So very true. And a nice reminder of the 3-2-1 backup.

https://www.thebdr.net/articles/IT/adm/IT-DontDie.pdf

Two-factor authentication is an essential security measure that uses your phone to help prevent unauthorized access to your account. It makes it harder to access your account if you lose your phone, but that’s also sort of the point. Thankfully, you aren’t without options if you can’t find the one device you use to verify that you are actually you.Two-factor authentication, by its very nature, is designed to prevent access to your accounts if you don’t have access to your phone (or other authenticating device). Therefore, there aren’t many ways to circumvent this requirement after the fact. There are many ways to prevent this problem from happening, however. So don’t wait until you lose your phone to set them up.

Arigi is a system for managing Syncthing instances in bulk. As a layer above the Syncthing API, Arigi provides centralized overview and configuration management of multiple devices. Arigi lets you eliminate repetitive manual work, reduce the time to deployment, and increase consistency and efficiency.

Arigi is available as free for use with up to five devices; managing larger clusters requires a commercial license.

Social Bookmarking for Introverts

• Pinboard is a fast, no-nonsense bookmarking site for people who value privacy and speed.
• There are no ads and no third-party tracking. You pay a few bucks a year, and that's it.
• Pinboard lets you bookmark from any browser, connect up to three Twitter accounts (and favorites), and sync with popular services like Instapaper or Pocket.
• For a few more bucks a year, Pinboard offers an archiving service which saves a copy of everything you bookmark, gives you full-text search, and automatically checks your account for dead links.

ArchiveBox
The open-source self-hosted web archive.

ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more).

You can use it to preserve access to websites you care about by storing them locally offline. ArchiveBox imports lists of URLs, renders the pages in a headless, authenticated, user-scriptable browser, and then archives the content in multiple redundant common formats (HTML, PDF, PNG, WARC) that will last long after the originals disappear off the internet. It automatically extracts assets and media from pages and saves them in easily-accessible folders, with out-of-the-box support for extracting git repositories, audio, video, subtitles, images, PDFs, and more.

The git-annex assistant creates a synchronised folder on each of your OSX and Linux computers, Android devices, removable drives, NAS appliances, and cloud services. The contents of the folder are the same everywhere. It's very easy to use, and has all the power of git and git-annex.

installation

The git-annex assistant comes as part of git-annex. See install to get it installed.

See the release notes for an overview of the status, and upgrade instructions.

Storing backups in the cloud requires a level of trust that not everyone is willing to give. While the convenience and low cost of automated, off-site backups is very compelling, the reality of putting personal data in the hands of complete strangers will never sit quite right with some people.

Enter Tarsnap—"on-line backups for the truly paranoid". Tarsnap is the brainchild of Dr Colin Percival, a former FreeBSD Security Officer. In 2006, he began research and development on a new solution for "encrypted, snapshotted remote backups", culminating in the release of Tarsnap in 2008.

Unlike other on-line backup solutions, Tarsnap uses an open, documented cryptographic design that securely encrypts your files. Rather than trusting a vendor's cryptographic claims, you have full access to the source code, which uses open-source libraries and industry-vetted protocols, such as RSA, AES and SHA.

April 03, 2014

Tarsnap is the world’s best secure online backup service. It’s run by Colin Percival, Security Officer Emeritus at FreeBSD, a truly gifted cryptographer and programmer. I use it extensively in my company, recommend it to clients doing Serious Business (TM) all the time, and love seeing it successful.

It’s because I am such a fan of Tarsnap and Colin that it frustrates me to death. Colin is not a great engineer who is bad at business and thus compromising the financial rewards he could get from running his software company. No, Colin is in fact a great engineer who is so bad at business that it actively is compromising his engineering objectives. (About which, more later.) He’s got a gleeful masochistic streak about it, too, so much so that Thomas Ptacek and I have been promising for years to do an intervention. That sentiment boiled over for me recently (why?), so I took a day off of working on my business and spent it on Colin’s instead.

Tarsnap (the software) is a very serious backup product which is designed to be used by serious people who are seriously concerned about the security and availability of their data. It has OSS peer-reviewed software written by a world-renowned expert in the problem domain. You think your backup software is written by a genius? Did they win a Putnam? Colin won the Putnam. Tarsnap is used at places like Stripe to store wildly sensitive financial information.

Tarsnap (the business) is run with less seriousness than a 6 year old’s first lemonade stand.

That’s a pretty robust accusation. I could point to numerous pieces of evidence — the fact that it is priced in picodollars (“What?” Oh, don’t worry, we will come back to the picodollars), or the fact that for years it required you to check a box certifying that you were not a Canadian because Colin (who lives in Canada) thought sales taxes were too burdensome to file (thankfully fixed these days), but let me give you one FAQ item which is the problem in a nutshell.

Q: What happens when my account runs out of money?

A: You will be sent an email when your account balance falls below 7 days worth of storage costs warning you that you should probably add more money to your account soon. If your account balance falls below zero, you will lose access to Tarsnap, an email will be sent to inform you of this, and a 7 day countdown will start; if your account balance is still below zero after 7 days, it will be deleted along with the data you have stored.

Yes folks, Tarsnap — “backups for the truly paranoid” — will in fact rm -rf your backups if you fail to respond to two emails. //

The darkly comic thing about this is I might even be wrong. It’s possible Colin is, in fact, not accurately stating his own policies. It is possible that, as a statement about engineering reality, the backups are actually retained after the shot clock expires e.g. until Colin personally authorizes their deletion after receiving customer authorization to do so. But even if this were true, the fact that I — the customer — am suddenly wondering whether Tarsnap — the robust built-for-paranoids backup provider — will periodically shoot all my backups in the head just to keep things interesting makes choosing Tarsnap a more difficult decision than it needed to be. (If Colin does, in fact, exercise discretion about shooting backups in the head, that should be post-haste added to the site. If he doesn’t and there is in fact a heartless cronjob deleting people’s backups if they miss two emails that should be fixed immediately.)

I store my photos in git-annex. A full copy of the annex exists on my laptop and on an external drive. Encrypted copies of all of my photos are stored on Amazon S3 (which I pay for) and box.com (which provides 50GB for free) via git-annex special remotes. The photos are backed-up to an external drive daily with the rest of my laptop hard drive via backitup.sh and cryptshot. My entire laptop hard drive is also mirrored monthly to an external drive stored off-site.

(The majority of my photos are also on Flickr, but I don’t consider that a backup or even reliable storage.)

All of this is what I consider to be the bare minimum for any redundant data storage. Photos have special value, above the value that I assign to most other data. This value only increases with age. As such they require an additional backup method, but due to the size of my collection I want to avoid backup methods that involve paying for more online storage, such as Tarsnap.

I choose optical discs as the medium for my photo backups. This has the advantage of being read-only, which makes it more difficult for accidental deletions or corruption to propagate through the backup system. DVD-Rs have a capacity of 4.7 GBs and a cost of around $0.25 per disc. Their life expectancy varies, but 10-years seem to be a reasonable low estimate. ///

add parity info to each disc with parchive

backup strategies -- cold storage on encrypted drives managed with git-annex, remote repositories managed with borg and rclone, optical storage of archival photos, encrypted financials, etc.

For years the core of my backup strategy has been rsnapshot via cryptshot to various external drives for local backups, and Tarsnap for remote backups.

Tarsnap, however, can be slow. It tends to take somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes to create my dozen or so archives, even if little has changed since the last run. My impression is that this is simply due to the number of archives I have stored and the number of files I ask it to archive. Once it has decided what to do, the time spent transferring data is negligible. I run Tarsnap hourly. Twenty minutes out of every hour seems like a lot of time spent Tarsnapping.

Initially I played with borgmatic to perform and maintain the backups. Unfortunately it seems to have issues with signal handling, which caused me to end up with annoying lock files left over from interrupted backups. Borg itself has good documentation and is easy to use, and I think it is useful to build familiarity with the program itself instead of only interacting with it through something else. So I did away with borgmatic and wrote a small bash script to handle my use case.

Creating the backups is simple enough. Borg disables compression by default, but after a little experimentation I found that LZ4 seemed to be a decent compromise between compression and performance.

Pruning backups is equally easy. I knew I wanted to match roughly what I had with Tarsnap: hourly backups for a day or so, daily backups for a week or so, then a month or two of weekly backups, and finally a year or so of monthly backups.

Vorta is a backup client for macOS and Linux desktops. It integrates the mighty Borg Backup with your favorite desktop environment to protect your data from disk failure, ransomware and theft.

• Encrypted, deduplicated and compressed backups using Borg as backend.
• No vendor lock-in – back up to local drives, your own server or BorgBase, a hosting service for Borg backups.
• Open source – free to use, modify, improve and audit.
• Flexible profiles to group source folders, backup destinations and schedules.
• One place to view all point-in-time archives and restore individual files.

Installation

Vorta should work on all platforms that support Qt and Borg. This includes macOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux and many others. Windows is currently not supported by Borg, but this may change in the future.

All the resources you need to develop a comprehensive backup strategy with BorgBase and apply it in your environment.

rsync.net accounts have full support for borg backup

borg creates and maintains encrypted, remote backups.

• • Your data is encrypted with keys that only you hold
• • rsync.net cannot see your data.
• • Backups are fast, bandwidth efficient and compressed/deduplicated.
• • borg is fully open source and is in active, current development

Specific borg Features

• You may access the account with any tool that runs over SSH - not just borg.

• You may create and maintain an unlimited number of borg repositories.

• You have full control over your authorized_keys file to restrict IP and command access - or to enforce append-only mode.

• You may configure custom alerts to generate email, SMS, or Pushover warnings - or call a webhook. Or all of the above.

• You may set your account to be immutable (read-only) and accessible only by SSH key (disabled passwords).

We support legacy borg versions for backward compatibility - currently 0.29 and 1.x branches.

Special Pricing for borg Accounts

Special "borg accounts" are available at a very deep discount for technically proficient users.

• • Free ZFS filesystem snapshots are not included since you'll be doing versioning and retention with borg.
• • We will not configure subaccounts, or additional logins, for these borg accounts.
• • There is NO borg specific technical support or integration engineering. You're here because you're an expert.

Choose any location

• • NO Charges for ingress/egress
• • Unlimited borg Repositories
• • Start with 100 GB for $18/year
• $0.015/GB/Month

Simple and Secure Offsite Backups
Hosting for Borg Repositories. From $2/month, 5 GB free Trial.

$25/year
Billed annually, 30 days refund
100GB, then $0.01/GB/month
10 repositories

$80/year
1TB, then $0.007/GB/month

Configuration Assistant
Quick setup with pre-filled Borg commands and templates for Borgmatic.

STORAGE BOXES
ACCESS YOUR STORAGE FROM EVERYWHERE AND AT ANY TIME
VIA PC, SMARTPHONE, AND TABLET

Simply choose one of the storage sizes,
and upgrade or downgrade your size to suit your needs.

3.45Euro/mo, 100GB
9.40 Euro/mo, 1TB