How do you make your tech life failsafe?

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patrick24601

The Action Man
Jan 29, 2007
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:question4:Over the years I've been moving various parts of my world online/to the cloud. One of the advantages is that you can recover from a computer crash pretty easily by firing up another computer and moving on. But I am always interested in improvement so I am curious as to how others roll when it comes to online storage. I also come from a background of disaster recovery so getting back to productive time is extremely important to me.

My toolkit:
- Google apps/gmail for all email
- Foxmarks to remember bookmarks, tabs, some passwords, browsing history
- Dropbox for file saving and sync. This is the absolute best tool and my first install
- Mozy. Just started using this and judgment is still out
- Roboform with online sync (password mgmt/form filling)
- Basecamp for projects. Highrise for contacts.

I don't know what to do about my 15K songs yet. I keep them on a sep. partition for now and pray none of my entire physical drives fail. They are in queue to be backed up by Mozy but that is still a full week or two from completion to back up over 100G.

Key questions:
- What tools are you using ?
- If your computer and house just blew up and you had to run down to the store and get a vanilla one off the shelf how long until you could be productive again ?
 


Great info; I'm working towards moving everything over to the Cloud as well.

Just wondering if anyone can recommend an email aggregator for my 50 email accounts...I've been using Outlook but it's not "cloud-based" and I can't access all my accounts on the go.

I don't want to use Gmail/Google by the way.
 
That is not what dropbox is for. Use google docs for that. Google spreadsheets too - that is damn cool in multi user edit mode.
 
Cracker said:
Great info; I'm working towards moving everything over to the Cloud as well.

Just wondering if anyone can recommend an email aggregator for my 50 email accounts...I've been using Outlook but it's not "cloud-based" and I can't access all my accounts on the go.

I don't want to use Gmail/Google by the way.
Click to expand...


get your own server and run software that'll be able to access of of the accounts. but why not consolidate and have all of the accounts forward to like 5 accounts? or something more manageable?
 
- been using mozy for a few years, they are excellent, have several hundred gigs backed up, and they are pretty good at detecting when you're not using your computer, and backing up then. of course you can manually backup even more.

- One of the best way that I sync up all of my passwords is combination of password storage software and dropbox. I use Keepass, but there are several others out there. Here's how to do this. Put the encrypted password file onto a dropbox folder, so it'll automatically sync up across all computers. Then you'll just need the password software to open it from anywhere. For added security, of if you wan to even put your encrypted password file onto the "public" folder, (and there are legitimate reasons to do so), use a keyfile with the password to open up your password file. This password file is the most important thing in the world, next to your life, so I have a 50+ char password and also a 4K keyfile to decrypt it.

- I'm working on a "server side" software, that you can run on your own HIGHLY secure server, to manage all of the online business.
 
cardine said:
I have a Windows Server for this purpose but I still feel uneasy putting anything important into the cloud.
Click to expand...
Well, unless you're being specifically targeted by very l337 people, the cloud itself is unlikely to be the place where your stuff gets compromised.

As for me:

  • Important data such as porn, music and movies on the cloud.
  • Day to day stuff like reports & spreadsheets on email and google docs.
  • Google apps for email
  • (GNU)PGP on local storage.
  • Use SSL VPN all the time.
  • DBAN storage often.
  • Sandboxie when using windows.
  • iptables+ufw on *nix, zone alarm on windows.
As for passwords I'm still stuck with using a few over & over. I really like the idea of openID and I think forum softwares like vbulletin should enable it by default. It's ridiculously easy to "decrypt" md5 even without the salt thanks to large existing databases. openID with a grid card (plus password) would be awesome.
 
Dropbox for important personal files
CDP Server for incremental hourly server backups
ReadyNAS NV+ for raid 5 large file backups (100gig+ files)
Google apps for email
 
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