[81578] in Cypherpunks
Re: BAD ADVICE WARNING from Kent: Access to Storage and Communication
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Igor Chudov @ home)
Tue Jun 10 23:12:40 1997
To: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 21:35:32 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <95X48D67w165w@bwalk.dm.com> from "Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM" at Jun 10, 97 08:06:19 pm
From: ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)
Reply-To: ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)
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.
