Reclaim Your Digital Life

This topic might sound boring and dry but it is a very very important part of maintaining your privacy online. Think about it: We all want to keep our files safe. We also all want to store our files in a place where we can always access them no matter what device we are on. And we all must have good backups of any files that are important, including a remote backup.

Non-privacy fans typically acheive this with something like google drive, or icloud or dropbox. But all of these options give someone else access to your files. Encryption doesn’t protect your privacy unless you are the ones holding the encryption key. In other words, these services may advertise that they use encryption to store your files, but they are the ones holding the encryption keys, so they can read your files. Simple as that.

So how to privacy fans do it? Of course there is more than one way, but this my appraoch…

1.) Buy a NAS. More specficially, buy a NAS that you trust.

NAS stands for “Network Attached Storage”. It is a device that lives on your network and stores your files.

A hard drive could do this job though, right? Yes it coud. But a hard drive will fail one day and you risk loosing your data. A NAS does much much more, and this is critical for keeping your data safe (remember, if you don’t trust the cloud you have to take data saftey matters into your own hands):

• NAS uses RAID configurations. In other words a NAS contains more than 1 hard drive. But instead of filling each hard drive with different data, it spreads the data accorss the hard drives. This acheives two things. Firstly it means that when you write a file all of your drives are involved in the writing, which increases your write speed. The same is true when you read a file – all your hard drives are involved in the reading process so your read speed is faster. In addition to performance improvements, RAID can be used to create redundancy. In other words you could have some drives that are “mirrors” of other drives so that when a hard drive fails you don’t loose your data. If you want to rad more about RAID options look at this other website.
• NAS uses ZFS file system. Now to be clear, not all NAS’s use this file system, but TrueNAS does and it is in my opinion absolutely critical. ZFS is the only good way that I know of to protect against bit-rot. Bit-rot is the tendancy of data on hard drives to degrade over time, causing your files to become corrupted. If you have ever tried to open a very old file and found that it no longer opens, this may be why. But the ZFS file system protects against this in the following way. Whenever it writes data it writes a hash of the data along side it. When it reads the data it also reads the hash. If the hash and the data don’t match, it knows there has been an error. Then, depending on your RAID array, it may have enough data to correct the error. If it doesn’t, and a true data error occurs, you will be notified and you can restore the file from backup. Remember, that if this same disk error had occured when you were not using ZFS you would never have even known, and you would probably have lost the file forever. Even if you had a backed up copy of it, you wouldn’t have known to retreive it. You essentially need ZFS if you plan to store your own important files, it is the only way. Now as a side point, ZFS has a lot of other good features too, and can read about it here if you want to.
• NAS house your files, but share it with the devices on your network. You can chose your prefered sharing protecol (SMB, NFS, etc). This has advantages over a normal hard drive if two devices on your network try to edit the same file once.
• A NAS is designed to be left on always, and it “looks after” your files even when your computers are turned off. For example you could install software on a NAS that does a virus scan, or you could install software on it that does backups for you. You could configure it to email you if a problem (such as a disk error) is identified. And it can do these things while all your other devices are turned off.

For me, chosing a NAS is easy. I want something that runs open source software, as whenever possible I prefer not to trust propriatry software. I want something that uses ZFS (above). I want something that is pre-made (if you want to make your own and then install TrueNAS on it that is a great idea! But I went the easy way). My exact setup is as follows:

• TrueNAS mini which you can configure and purchse here. There is a range to chose from but they all run TrueNAS and use ZFS.
• My computers access the files on the NAS via SMB sharing protecol (you could use any sharing protecol, doesn’t matter)
• The NAS runs a sofware called “nextcloud” which is open sourced, and which enables my phones to automatically upload an photos to the NAS (iphone and android both have open source Nextcloud apps available)
• The NAS runs software called Duplicati which backs up my files to dropbox. WHAT??? DROPBOX you say. Yes. But the important thing is that duplicati encrypts the data before uploading it, and I am the only one who has those encryption keys. Thus I gain a remote backup (ie the ability to restore my files even if my house burns down and I lose all my computers) but dropbox does not have the ability to read my files (because encrypted).

Summary: File storage may be boring but it is a critical part of reclaiming your digital life because if you want to keep your files out of the cloud, you need the tools and knowlage to keep them safe yourself. I recommend a NAS running TrueNAS with backup software called duplicati which encrypts your files before it sends your backups to the cloud. TrueNAS