---
title: Security and Data Recovery 
author: Colton Grainger
revised: 2018-01-16
belief: likely
---

As I move more information online, what information do I need to encrypt? to
back-up?

> During intervals of the night, when anxiety had kept him waking, the same
> idea had occurred to him; concealment was his only security[.] [^radcliffe]

[^radcliffe]: [The Romance of the Forest](https://archive.org/details/romanceforestby00radcgoog), Ann Radcliffe, 1791

Currently, my personal files are backed up to an unencrypted hard drive and, if
public, hosted redundantly on github.

## Security Goals

- hosting my website on linode and adding a public key certificate
- understanding and implementing PGP for emails
- symmetric encryption for personal documents

## Personal Documents 

Having worked at a refugee resettlement agency, I believe the following
documents should be redundantly (and securely) stored online. Maybe also on
optical disk?

- national origin documents
- medical records
- financial history

## Backups 

- [“Backing Up Your Data”](https://linode.com/docs/security/backups/backing-up-your-data/). Linode Guides & Tutorials. Retrieved April 21, 2018.
- [“duplicity”](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/)
- [“Uses This / John MacFarlane”](https://usesthis.com/interviews/john.macfarlane/).

  > I back up all of my important data remotely. At work, I use a script wrapping
  > duplicity to do incremental encrypted backups to S3 buckets. 

## Privacy

I need to 
[save my passwords](http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/doc/msmtp.html#Authentication) 
in a keyring. I'd also like to create a [PGP key](ttps://pgp.mit.edu) to share. 
See [riseup.net](https://riseup.net/en/security/network-security/certificates).

To make strong passwords, I might learn a bit about Shannon Entropy. See [pthree](https://pthree.org/).

From [Scott Aaronson](https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/plogp.html):

    I was reading an obituary of Shannon, 
    asking myself: 
    why did it take till 1948?
    That the semantics of a message 
    are irrelevant to how to transmit it, 
    that the distribution from which the message was 
    chosen is all that matters, 
    is obvious.