I mostly use a combination of Rsync (mostly for my photos) and Unison (mostly for my personal documents) to back up my data between several machines. My documents get synchronised across several machines using Unison whereas Rsync just pushes my photos to another machine over the internet.
To use Unison across several machines, I always update to one central machine. Then whenever I can (especially before working on a file I have edited recently) just update everything on the machine I am working on and it knows what is old and new and copies it all. (Or you could use a CVS type system to the same effect, but probably not as nice a UI)
These solutions are great, but Cleversafe looks even more interesting. Although for former 2 options are cross platform (with the help of Cygwin on windows for ssh and rsync) Cleversafe is not, but it is much more resistant to damage and will give more space if you have several machines to back up.
One other option is Rsync.net who offer online backup via just about any method you can think of for $2/GB/month. Not the cheapest, but then not that expensive depending on the value of your data!
If you want help setting up cygwin and Rsync/Unison then give me a shout. I will be happy to help as best I can. Of course both these go to a linux server in my case, but you can install ssh on a windows box and do it that way too.
A while ago I wrote a post on Spore, now the BBC have posted on it. There is a link to a video interview with the creator of spore at the top of the page, but I will have to wait until I get home to watch it and see if it is the same as the one I have in my post.
There has been a fair bit on encryption recently. The UK government is trying to make it impossible to keep your encryption keys to yourself (as I posted recently).
On this note, the UK government is passing another stupid law. ZDNet UK news: UK law will criminalise IT pros. Basically they want to make it illegal to create or distribute tools that could be used by crackers (they said hackers, but really mean crackers. Read how to be a hacker for the difference). This almost makes sense, until your realise that all sysadmins use these tools too. Not just port scanners to check that your system is secure, but even Perl would be covered by this law. You probably can’t find a sysadmin who has never written in perl, yet this essential sysadmin tool could be made illegal by this badly thought out law.
The New York Times has a good arcticle on VoIP encryption. Philip R. Zimmermann has released a new VoIP program for Linux and Mac which uses public key encryption. The inventor of PGP is a strong advocate for privacy but according to the article he may have some trouble, as an encrypted VoIP connection cannot be intercepted by security services. The CIA will not be happy with this, and it is hard to say what will happen. Zfone may not be around very long, which would be a shame as I also believe strongly in privacy.
There is an article on ZDNet News looking at how the power of the Government to force handover of encryption keys. First of all, it is already law that you have to hand over encryption keys of face 2 years in jail (5 if you are a terrorist suspect - so if you are wearing a coat on the underground!). I completely understand why they made these laws, but the actual implications of them are scary…
Suppose I use public key encryption (which I do) to send an encrypted email to a friend. It does not matter what I say because only he can read it. He replies and only I can read the reply. Now imagine my hard disk dies, and I do not have a backup of my decryption key, but the encrypted email is still on my mailserver. The police arrest me for something (possibly as above being a geek on the underground), they look through my email and find the encrypted email. They demand the key. I say I don’t have it (which is true, I don’t have a copy as my hard disk died and was thrown out). I end up being imprisoned for 2-5 years because I did not keep a copy of the key securely…
Now let’s say that the email above was really old and I threw out that key ages ago and set up a new one. I might still have a copy of the key to decrypt that email with, but more likely is that I don’t need that email any more and the key has been deleted and I never got round to deleting the email from my server (i.e. Gmail). The same could happen…
This law is not scary because the police can force you to hand over your key (not just decrypt one email, but all of your emails not to mention send emails that are authenticated as from you), but they can arrest you not just for refusing, but if you actually cannot comply. What sort of law makes you guilty for not doing the impossible?
Update:
I wanted to add something for those people that will say “the only people that need encryption are those with something to hide”. But everyone has something to hide… Like banking details. I could email a trusted friend my bank details when I go on holiday so they can sort out a money problem or whatever. Of course I want to encrypt that email, what if the network admin’s want to read my emai? You think your email is safe? there are many people able to read your email, and thats just counting those that are allowed to. Then there are crackers trying to break into servers and email accounts so they can use your accounts with online shops to buy things.
Personally I would prefer that every email sent to me with a password was encrypted, that way even if someone broke into my email account, they couldn’t get anything other than chain mail’s and jokes.
I found a wonderful post of Debian packages release names in Debian (and also Ubuntu), and there are some wonderful ones in there. Check it out…
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