Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Ray Arachelian <sunder@brainlink.com> writes:
Passphrases can be memorized. 4mm DAT tapes hold several gigs and are tiny. Ever see one? Fits in your pocket. It's smaller that an audio cassette. Fairly easy to guard, but, if your data is backed up in encrypted form (cyphertext), and not clear text, you don't even need to bother protecting the tape. (That is unless your backup software uses a weak cypher as most tend to do.) [FYI: Your knowledge of tape technologies is severly lacking. 4mm tapes hold 2-4Gb. Exabytes 5Gb-10Gb. Mamouth Exabytes (same size as 8mm camcorder video tapes, smaller than audio cassettes) hold as much as 40Gb in a very small form factor.]
I'm actually thinking of getting a pair of 4mm tape drives to replace my existing backup system (very old drives that use DC 600As; only .25GB / drive, pretty slow, no NT drivers; time to upgrade)
I wonder: if the data is well-encrypted, wouldn't it make the compression pretty ineffective?
You can compress before the encryption (if the encryption algorithm does not do compression). tar cvfz - /directory | Encrypt > /dev/ftape or something like that. Another thing to worry about is being able to at least partially restore data if one or several blocks get corrupted. - Igor.