I’m David. I live in Tacoma, Washington. I do square foot gardening, home automation with Home Assistant, and have too many cats.

You think you saw me behind some ferns? You just might have!

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • The other thing is if I get hit by a bus and no one can work out how to decrypt a backup or whatever.

    Documentation, documentation, documentation. No matter what system you have, make sure your loved ones have a detailed, image-heavy, easy to follow guide on how restorations work - at the file level, at the VM level, at whatever level you are using.

    That being said, DVDs actually have quite a short shelf life, all things considered. I’d be more inclined to use a pair of archival strength USB NVME drive, updated and tested routinely(quarterly, yearly, whatever makes sense). Or even an LTO tape, if you want to purchase the drive and some tapes.

    You can put your backups in something like VeraCrypt. Set an insanely long password, encoded in a QR code, printed on paper. Store it in the same secured location you store your USB drives (or elsewhere, if you have a security posture).

    You may also consider, if money is not a concern, a cloud VPS or other online file storage, similarly encrypted. This can provide an easy URL to access for the less tech-savvy, along with secured credentials for recovery efforts. Depending on what your successors might need to access, this could be a very straightforward way to log into a website and download what they need in an emergency.