On 15/07/18 20:27, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:35:18 +0100, ss wrote:

On 14/07/2018 14:50, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Franly investng time and effort to read an onbsolete drive more than
once, to get the data off, is not in my list of cool hip ways to spend
my life


Agree with you about faffing around with obsolete stuff, but the *one*
argument for having a backup drive not permanently connected is that it
saves you from nasty ransomeware that quietly scrambles all your FATs.

Sorry but that's at least twice you've made this misleading statement
about ransomware scrambling FATs. It's not the FS metadata that gets
scrambled, it's the data stored by targeted file types that gets
encrypted with a 1024 bit (or larger) encryption key regardless of the FS
type.

For example, all that's needed for a NAS disk volume's contents to be
vulnerable to such ransomware, regardless of the FS used by the NAS box,
is that it be mapped read/write to a drive letter on an infected MS
windows client machine.


I already have a 20GB external hard drive which I just update a few
times a year, mostly pictures and a few excel stuff. Purely a back up
should my PC fail, it is not permanently connected.

Whilst a 20GB drive is laughably small by today's standards (what with
the sweet spot price point now around the 6TB mark), only connecting it
up to perform backup/restore operations a few times a year is an
effective way to minimise the risk of its contents getting encrypted by
ransomware. Note the use of the phrase, "minimise the risk". However,
assuming reasonable vigilance, it's an effective strategy (a vigilant
user would be extremely unlucky to be hit by a ransomware attack just
when they'd randomly attached their backup drive for another session but
sometimes, "**** (just) Happens"(tm F.Gump)).


Interestingly I am safe from ransom ware purely by an accident of design
- apart from running Desktop Linux anyway.

And this may be of interest to windows users.

All my important data is on a server. That runs Linux.. It happens to
export that data via NFS, because I have no windows or MAC clients, but
it could export it via Samba and so make it available to Windows and MAC
users.

It backs that data up on a timed script to a second disk that is not
visible either to NFS or SAMBA

Unless corruption happened and I didn't notice BEFORE the backup, I
always have a 'last nights snapshot' available.

Even then if I thought a scrambled disk was a possibility I would create
a file called do.not.touch.me and test to see if it had changed and not
do a backup unless I found out why.

Having a Linux based twin disk server instead of NAS is handy

I use a really old PC. With a LOT of disks


--
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such
time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic
and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for
the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the
truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels