Dumb but Important Question

[Billy Rygar]

I need to purchase a secure hard drive for storing important info.  What is the best option?

[Himu]

external or internal?

[cool breeze]

how large? because isn't flash storage pretty secure?

my experience with external hard drives has been pretty solid even with cheap seagate/western digital ones.  I replaced my ~5 year old seagate one before it died or developed any problems (then again, the internal one died within a year).

[Dickie Dee]

Maybe off-topic, but are there types of burnables that are geared towards longevity that you (i.e. not you, your company) can pay a premium for? Do they sell such things? Compared mabye to whatever the shelf life is of pressed discs.

(sorry to not answer Cohen's question)

[TEEEPO]

maybe invest in dropbox or some sort of online storage as well as an external hd?

[Madrun Badrun]

RAID for redundancy and encrypting your data for security.  And be sure that you also have an offsite backup.

[Vizzys]

for partition encryption use truecrypt

aes-twofish-serpent

30+ chracter passphrase and its uncrackable unless someone beats the password out of you

[T-Short]

Get a NAS with two mirrored drives and encrypt the storage :arr

[Corporal]

Look into a NAS that does lowlevel encryption and RAID. They're usually pretty tame in price (around 1k$ for a good 4-drive case) and you'll only need two or so (one on-site, one or more offsite, far away at secure locations, kept in sync via SFTP, rsync-over-SSH or good oldfashioned heavily encrypted VPN).

If lowlevel encryption isn't an option just format the whole thing and drop an iso on it as a Truecrypt drive (i.e. handle crypto on the client side).

It all boils down to what kind of NAS you'll use. Just to get you started, QNAP NAS from the TS-239Pro and up should be able to do what you need.


You can also roll your own NAS using an old PC and CryptoNAS or FreeNAS, but then you'll be the one to blame if something goes wrong. LUKS and dm-crypt may be worth looking into, and unless you have a Windows server license floating around you'll probably use OpenBSD or Linux.

[GilloD]

Problem with flash storage is they're not great for constant re-writes. They are a little better for long term storage than external 2.5" drives, but if you use them a lot, that reliability degrades.

Or just use dropbox.

I cant find the article, but some dude did a test and it took like 90 million read/write cycles before his Flash drive finally ate it.