Protect my data on my slave HD
Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2014 5:49 pm
I have a "slave" drive that I backup all my data to daily. Is there a way to lock that data down and still have an every 2 hour backup to it?
I guess it depends on what you're trying to protect it from.
If you're worried about physical theft/damage - and just your loss of the data, (I.E. fire, burglar, etc) then really you need to have the data in a different physical location.
If you're worried about someone getting their hands on the data and not letting them read it (I.E. burglar, subpoena, etc.) then encrypt the data, put a password protection on the encryption, and make sure you lock your computer when you're not using it - those steps will mean that someone will have to have your password in order to read the data. (I'm honestly not sure about drive encryption packages available out there, so I don't have any particular recommendations for what you should use.)
If you're worried about someone hacking you, stealing your password, and/or doing one of those ransomware things then the only really foolproof method is offline storage.... but that would not allow you to have automatic backups every 2 hours. The bugger about automated backups (unless you do incremental backups, and maybe even then) is that if your data gets messed up and you don't catch it before the next backup, your backup gets messed up, too.
Here's what I'd say would be the most robust backup system: Have a local, connected, and encrypted drive that does your automated backups every two hours. Along with that, have a remote, encrypted, offline drive that you bring in to update about once a week. The first one helps with the "oops I broke something" kind of restores. the second one covers you for the disaster type of events - someone hacks you in the middle of the night, you have a fire, or someone's holding your data hostage and demanding a fee.