LETTER OF THE MONTH
Secret clouds
I regularly backup my Fedora to an external disk but I’ve just realised that it would be quite useful to backup some important information away from the house, in case there’s a fire or another similar disaster. I therefore started investigating storing information in the cloud. Because it’s sensitive financial information, I want to encrypt it before sending it across. Ideally, I’d like to send the information to the cloud using a shell script so I can set it up to run automatically. I did some research and I discovered that I need a lot of background information to make this work, and I wondered whether this might give some ideas for an article in Linux Format.
I think CryFS would be a good encryption system. How about the following ideas for the magazine:
1 A Roundup article on cloud storage providers, with their pros and cons. Can they be accessed through a shell script, and if so, is this easy to do?
2 A Roundup article on encryption systems that are of sufficient quality to be used for entrusting data to the cloud.
3 It seems CryFS is not in the Fedora repository, and I may have to get it directly from Github. I know nothing at all about Github, so do you think a short article about how to use it might be of general interest?
Ian Van Maanen
Neil says…
Well, this very issue Jonni should be outlining how to use Git to start your own projects and access existing ones, so hopefully that’ll be of immediate help. Otherwise, absolutely! With us having so much digital stuff these days you have to ensure it’s safe, and off-site backups are as useful for individuals as corporations. You could be making things overly complicated for yourself, but this isn’t really the place to go into options. Those are great suggestions for both Roundups and we should do tutorials on some, too.