Backup and Dropbox Strategy

The hard drive on my iMac is making a funny noise, which is a good excuse to review my current backup strategy. It’s fairly simple these days. All of my data is on a 3TB iMac fusion drive. That gets backed up 3 ways. It’s backed up to an Apple Time Capsule, which also serves as my main WiFi router. I also use CrashPlan to back up to their cloud service, CrashPlan Central. And as a third backup, I use CrashPlan to back up to a USB drive every couple of weeks. The USB drive is otherwise stored in a (hopefully) fireproof safe. This gives me the safety of an off-site backup as well as the speediness of two different on-site backups. I’ve had occasion to use the Time Capsule to recover some files, but I have not yet had to rely on any of the CrashPlan backups. CrashPlan provides the software to do local backups for free; they make their money on CrashPlan Central. I signed up for the 4 year CrashPlan+ Family unlimited plan, because we have several computers to back up. When I first set up the CrashPlan cloud backup, I used their ‘seed service’, in which a hard drive is mailed to you, you use it to do a local backup, and then you mail the drive back to them. This is much faster than doing the initial backup entirely over the net. These days, a discussion of backups wouldn’t be complete without talking about Dropbox. My wife and I share a Dropbox account. It’s a great way to share family-related information, and it’s automatically backed up. But we wanted some extra security on the files we share, so we encrypt our Dropbox account using BoxCryptor. BoxCryptor creates an encrypted volume on top of a Dropbox directory. This shows up on Windows as another drive; on Mac it shows up as a volume. It encrypts files on a per-file basis, instead of creating a monolithic encrypted filesystem. This allows DropBox to continue to sync on a file-by-file basis when something changes. BoxCryptor is free for individuals; the paid version has extra features. One feature to consider is encryption of file names. It provides an extra level of security; if someone were able to look at your DropBox account, they’d only see a bunch of files with gibberish for file names. In the end, I decided against enabling that feature. We’re giving up a little bit of security (the file data itself is still encrypted). The advantage of not encrypting file names comes up in the case of recovering deleted files, should you have to do that. You’ll be able to locate the files to recover because the file names are still readable. That wouldn’t be possible with encrypted file names.