View Single Post
  #3   (View Single Post)  
Old 5th May 2017
Carpetsmoker's Avatar
Carpetsmoker Carpetsmoker is offline
Real Name: Martin
Tcpdump Spy
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Netherlands
Posts: 2,243
Default

Like jggimi I also use Tarsnap. Have for many years.

Last year I lost a lot of files I care about.

Here's what happened: tarsnap is strongly encrypted with a key file which is (optionally) protected with a passphrase. I set a randomly generated passphrase for my key file and stored this in my password manager. So far so good.

I store almost everything I care about in /data/stuff/; this contains a lot of, well, "stuff", including the password manager database. Due to an extremely stupid fat-fingered mistake on my part I issued a rm -r /data/stuff, blowing away most of that directory before I could ^C it.

"No worries, 'sall good!", I thought, since I had a recent backup! I tried to restore it, and realized I had a problem when it asked for passphrase. My password database was removed. I could restore it from the backup, but I needed access to ... the password database. Due to the strong encryption, there is no way this data can ever be recovered.

A backup is only as good as the weakest link, and in my case the weakest link was that the passphrase was stored in only one location. Oops :-(
__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
Reply With Quote