On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:01:35 +0100 (BST) Srdjan Todorovic todorovic.s@googlemail.com allegedly wrote:
I've got an offsite backup of some of my data, in case my apartment burns down etc. Since I dont have full control of the backup machine, I encrypt my data using PGP/GPG, and then upload to the backup service host.
This is so far well and good.
The GPG private key is on the machine in my apartment, beside possibly a copy being on some old floppy or CD-R.
What happens if my apartment burns down? I will have my data backed up nice and snug on the backup service host. But since I cannot remember a 4096bit PGP private key pair, I would be in a bit of a bind.
Could anyobne please offer some strategies to overcome this?
I think someone on irc suggested some time ago that I mail my parents a copy of my key pair... but I'm not sure I'd want to do that (they might lose it).
Well you could keep a copy (on the medium of your choice) at your place of work - assuming you don't work at home of course.
Only you can decide the value of your data and the risk you are prepared to carry. If the data is so valuable that you are prepared to spend hard cash to protect it, then you could do what people have done for many years with paper documents and pay for a "safety deposit box" type approach and rent space with a document storage company (think yellow box, but smaller).
Personally I have a safe in my garage (which is not attached to my house).
Mick ---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------