We rarely have power outages here. But when we do (like today's one hour outage), it gets me to thinking. Today's was somewhat freaky to me. Yes, the house gets quiet as a mouse. The place is noticeably silent. But the weird part today was that outside was still as a rock. Not the slightest hint of a breeze. I was looking hard and I could not detect a single leave or blade of grass moving. That was wild. I started thinking of that old Stephen King movie "The Langoliers" where they were going from location to location in a jet but they were running just a little bit behind "normal time". The premise was that the world dies off after the current time has passed and is destroyed. The movie was merely OK, but the premise was outstanding.
Anyway, after my freaked-out-ish-ness was over, I started thinking about more practical things. My first thought is always "Is this the big one? Will we never see electricity again?" And I started thinking about my backups of personal information that would be needed if I could relocate to a new place that had power. I have good backups. The stuff is copied to various computers we own, and is backed up to a dedicated backup server. Unfortunately, this is all inside my house. So if all these computers got damaged when the electricity went out, ... oops! But I do also have some of the stuff - the really important stuff - backed up into the cloud. Google Drive specifically. Because I don't trust Google farther than I can throw a stick, all my backups to their cloud are encrypted. By me, not by them. Nice and secure, right? But today I was thinking, "Now that I've moved to a new location - that has power - and I want to access all this stuff off Google Drive, how am I going to do that?" Assuming that our laptops and other mobile electronics that hold all the decryption keys were destroyed during the power outage? Uh oh, another oops! So while I could access Goggle Drive using somebody else's computer, I couldn't decrypt what I was able to download.
This is something that I had not thought about. Until today. I was thinking that what I need is some way to store my private stuff unencrypted, but secure from other's prying eyes. That's a big ask. I haven't thought up a good way to do this. I'm thinking that I might add something to my daily backup routines that copies important stuff to thumbrives - one stuck into each of our computer (for redundancy). Then we would need to remember to grab these thumbdrives as we left our house. And also hope that they were not destroyed by the power outage. Leaving the house, we would have to physically secure these thumbdrives somehow. Maybe just always keep them on us in our pockets?
I'll have to think about this some more. I don't really like this thumbdrive "solution", since it's not really a solution, it's just a half-a$$ed workaround. I guess instead of storing our actual stuff on the thumbdrives, I could just store the decryption keys. If somebody got ahold of that, the keys aren't going to do them much good if they don't know what/where the data is that they can decrypt. But next, I started thinking about, "What if this is the really big one, and nobody is going to have any electricity anywhere?" Hmmm, laptops have batteries, so there's a chance I could find someones that still worked. But Google Drive would be down. So now I'm back to needing my actual data on the thumbdrive. Maybe encrypted, but with the decryption keys on the same thumbdrive? That is never going to be totally secure, but there are ways to hide things so that it would be kind of secure. Maybe break up the decryption keys into different files, buried deep in the files so they're not obviously decryption keys, spread those files around the thumbdrive, and then manually reassemble the whole decryption key if needed? That's pretty good. Relatively secure. But nobody could accomplish that other than me (not with the computer knowledge present in my family), so it's still a half-a$$ed solution since only one person (me!) would know how to untangle the mess.
Then I started thinking, "If nobody has any electricity anywhere, what in the heck would I need my private information for?" Marriage license, birth certificates, medical records, financial stuff - would any of that even matter in a world with no electricity?
Oh well. The power's back on now, and I can return to my normal ignorant bliss.
Anyway, after my freaked-out-ish-ness was over, I started thinking about more practical things. My first thought is always "Is this the big one? Will we never see electricity again?" And I started thinking about my backups of personal information that would be needed if I could relocate to a new place that had power. I have good backups. The stuff is copied to various computers we own, and is backed up to a dedicated backup server. Unfortunately, this is all inside my house. So if all these computers got damaged when the electricity went out, ... oops! But I do also have some of the stuff - the really important stuff - backed up into the cloud. Google Drive specifically. Because I don't trust Google farther than I can throw a stick, all my backups to their cloud are encrypted. By me, not by them. Nice and secure, right? But today I was thinking, "Now that I've moved to a new location - that has power - and I want to access all this stuff off Google Drive, how am I going to do that?" Assuming that our laptops and other mobile electronics that hold all the decryption keys were destroyed during the power outage? Uh oh, another oops! So while I could access Goggle Drive using somebody else's computer, I couldn't decrypt what I was able to download.
This is something that I had not thought about. Until today. I was thinking that what I need is some way to store my private stuff unencrypted, but secure from other's prying eyes. That's a big ask. I haven't thought up a good way to do this. I'm thinking that I might add something to my daily backup routines that copies important stuff to thumbrives - one stuck into each of our computer (for redundancy). Then we would need to remember to grab these thumbdrives as we left our house. And also hope that they were not destroyed by the power outage. Leaving the house, we would have to physically secure these thumbdrives somehow. Maybe just always keep them on us in our pockets?
I'll have to think about this some more. I don't really like this thumbdrive "solution", since it's not really a solution, it's just a half-a$$ed workaround. I guess instead of storing our actual stuff on the thumbdrives, I could just store the decryption keys. If somebody got ahold of that, the keys aren't going to do them much good if they don't know what/where the data is that they can decrypt. But next, I started thinking about, "What if this is the really big one, and nobody is going to have any electricity anywhere?" Hmmm, laptops have batteries, so there's a chance I could find someones that still worked. But Google Drive would be down. So now I'm back to needing my actual data on the thumbdrive. Maybe encrypted, but with the decryption keys on the same thumbdrive? That is never going to be totally secure, but there are ways to hide things so that it would be kind of secure. Maybe break up the decryption keys into different files, buried deep in the files so they're not obviously decryption keys, spread those files around the thumbdrive, and then manually reassemble the whole decryption key if needed? That's pretty good. Relatively secure. But nobody could accomplish that other than me (not with the computer knowledge present in my family), so it's still a half-a$$ed solution since only one person (me!) would know how to untangle the mess.
Then I started thinking, "If nobody has any electricity anywhere, what in the heck would I need my private information for?" Marriage license, birth certificates, medical records, financial stuff - would any of that even matter in a world with no electricity?
Oh well. The power's back on now, and I can return to my normal ignorant bliss.
