Due to current events I started to think about options for a backup solution that would be able to cope with a complete disastrous loss of hardware. So, off-site storage was warranted.
What I came up with is a backup solution based on Duplicity and Amazon S3.
Storing personal data in the cloud may ring one or another alarm, but with Duplicity the data is safe from prying eyes as all backed up data is sent through GnuPG using public-key encryption before being transferred to Amazon’s data center. You should, however, make sure that one of the private keys used for encrypting the backup is locked away in a safe place, so you have it handy when it is time to perform a restore.
As far as storage costs are concerned, storing 50 GB of data in the AWS S3 cloud for a month costs around 6 EUR, which I personally consider quite competitive for redundant off-site data storage.
Naturally, one drawback remains: Bandwidth usage. It takes a while to load the first full backup into the cloud as the upstream of most DSL lines is rather limited. After that initial load has completed, however, Duplicity is capable of appending incremental backup sets to the existing backup data, so the incremental backups complete much faster.
P.S.: It may sound a little weird that I chose Amazon Web Services as a storage provider after my recent trouble with Amazon.de, but after some thorough market analysis AWS remained as the only feasible option.
Hash It!, an application for the Android platform I developed, is there to bridge this gap: It eases using unique passwords per web site without overloading your brain by generating site-specific passwords derived from a secret master key. It maintains compatibility with the Password Hasher Firefox extension.
