On the other hand, store things on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask... If it's in your home they don't have an easy interface to it, they have to physically infiltrate your residence, which costs a lot more and, presumably, will require more than a passing interest in you to happen.
Sure but then your hard drive fails (as they tend to do) and you lose all the data. Sounds like the right solution is just encryption on the client + 3rd party cloud storage.
Except its easy to build RAID enclosures that are USB mass storage devices. Plus, it replicates data across multiple Plugs in different location, and I think the Plug software also shares data on your computer (which can be RAIDed) through your private Plug network as well.
RAID is not a backup solution. If your filesystem is corrupted in software (or you just mistype and delete something important), it will happily replicate the damage across all of your drives.
Personally I feel recommending RAID to home users is generally a bad idea. It gives a false sense of security.
Depends on the file system implementation. Smarter RAID implementations, such those integrated into ZFS, will not be easily taken down.
In addition, RAID does not require you to use local devices. I agree, however, it is not a backup solution, and I did not claim it was. I merely stated RAID is how you deal with drives dying and taking everything with it. Backups is how you deal with RAIDs or entire locations dying, ergo, offsite backup.
And multiple Plug installations seems to cover the concurrent offsite sync part of that.
I setup unRaid for my wife's photography business. Haven't had to deal with an HD failure yet though so I can't vouch for it. Might be worth looking into yourself though for a cheap backup solution.
> on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask
That's assuming they just don't have complete access to everything anyway, as Guardian seemed to indicate today is the case with SkyDrive. Even if NSA or the FBI[1] is not interested in you specifically, they still might mine your data.
1. These leaks and especially today's Microsoft leak indicate substantial cooperation and intelligence sharing between NSA and the FBI.
I'm not understanding how these two things are different for the purposes of this discussion:
- The government asks for data on an ad hoc basis, and 3rd party providers trip over themselves in an effort to comply.
- The government gets a firehose of data for all customers of 3rd party providers.
It doesn't matter of the NSA is data-mining your SkyDrive, or the the local sheriff's office gets your SkyDrive data by just asking (i.e. without a warrant). Either way, your data is less secure when it's stored with a 3rd party provider than it is if you keep it in your own home.
When it's in your own home, law enforcement needs a warrant, and spy agencies need to physically send someone to bug your home. Either way, the bar has been raised to getting access to your data, so at the very least they will only access your data if there is a real reason to, and there will be some amount of oversight[1].
[1] Maybe not external on the spy agency side, but presumably orders to send people in to bug a home get more scrutiny, if for no other reason than the fact that it costs more.
If Plug ended up being widespread enough all they have to do is focus efforts on penetrating Plug devices. Security in the hands of end-users, while great for the tech savvy person with lots of free time, is a disaster for "normal" people.
