--- layout: post status: publish published: true title: ! 'Protecting Your Assets: Backing up your Academic Work' wordpress_id: 1859 wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/?p=1859 date: !binary |- MjAxMi0wMS0yMyAxMjoyNjoyMiArMDEwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMi0wMS0yMyAxMjoyNjoyMiArMDEwMA== categories: - Technology - Academia - Teaching tags: - Technology - Backup - PhDchat comments: - id: 6598 author: Steve Cooke author_email: stephen.cooke@manchester.ac.uk author_url: http://twitter.com/SteveCooke date: !binary |- MjAxMi0wMS0yMyAxMzozNzowMCArMDEwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMi0wMS0yMyAxMzozNzowMCArMDEwMA== content: I've had two laptops stolen with work on them, and a critical hard-drive failure on a PC, and am yet to lose any work. My local work is synced between my laptop and desktop machines to online storage using Ubuntu One (I used to use Dropbox) - which has some very basic version control and ridiculously easy to set up. No cost outlay is required and no special knowledge required to set it up - but the result is a set-up similar to yours. - id: 6599 author: Martin Paul Eve author_email: martin@martineve.com author_url: https://www.martineve.com date: !binary |- MjAxMi0wMS0yMyAxMzo0MjowMCArMDEwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMi0wMS0yMyAxMzo0MjowMCArMDEwMA== content: ! 'I find one the key problems to be that it is so much easier to set this up, at practically zero-cost, on *Nix systems. I''m also working entirely on GNU/Linux and I use Unison to sync between servers. ' - id: 6600 author: Steve Cooke author_email: stephen.cooke@manchester.ac.uk author_url: http://twitter.com/SteveCooke date: !binary |- MjAxMi0wMS0yMyAxMzo1MDowMCArMDEwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMi0wMS0yMyAxMzo1MDowMCArMDEwMA== content: Aye - it's much easier on a *nix based system, but you can use something like Dropbox on a Windows OS really easily and that easily has enough free storage for most. That too has some basic functionality for reverting to older versions of uploaded files. ---

I will be running, on the 31st January, a workshop for Sussex researchers on protecting their assets; aka. backing up their work.

After the first year of my Ph.D I had a nasty scare when my laptop was stolen on my journey home (I had a migraine, effectively passed out and didn't notice someone simply take my bag from beneath me on the train). This could have been dire. Fortunately, though, I take backup and encryption very seriously. I thought I'd share my backup plan.

The below diagram demonstrates the different backups I make. Each box on this network contains a full copy of my work. Communication between all channels is protected by SSL public-key encryption. The HDDs on the laptop and home machines are fully encrypted inside a LUKS container. Crashplan is a commercial service I use, based in the States in case of total failure of my system.

The web server and old-PC-server automatically sync with the home computer. These updates propogate to CrashPlan automatically, which archives a 30-day history in case of accidental deletion. The laptop syncs manually to prevent against accidental loss. Furthermore, the home computer automatically archives the last week's worth of work via the following line called in a daily Cron script:

{% highlight bash %} rsync -avz --delete /home/martin/Documents/Work/Uni /home/martin/Documents/Backup/Work/$(date +%A) {% endhighlight %}

Anybody have any tips for improving, or can beat that for security?