4 tips to secure your data outside of backup

Centralizing your data

One of the biggest tasks for most people is to get all their data in a central managable location that they know where it is and its easy to backup and managed and reliable.  For home networks a great solution for this is to leverage a NAS type solution.   My suggestion would be to build a storage server and install the latest build of OpenSolaris and make use of their ZFS filesystem to ensure your data is consistent and managable.

There are other options outside of OpenSolaris, and the ones that come to my mind are FreeNAS, Openfiler, and Windows Home Server.

Aside from having a central box that holds all your data it is also important that you structure the data in an organized manner that makes sense to your.  For example here is the setup of my file server that is running OpenSolaris

Publically accessible shares to anyone on the private network

/user-shares/pub/
/user-shares/pub/docs
/user-shares/pub/pictures
/user-shares/pub/music
/user-shares/pub/videos
/user-shares/pub/downloads

Private and senstive data that resides on an encrypted filesystem

/user-shares/priv/
/user-shares/priv/docs
/user-shares/priv/work
/user-shares/priv/dev
/user-shares/priv/pictures

It's important that you choose a file serving system that you are comfortable with and know how to properly backup.

Encrypting your sensitive data

If you are like me you have sensitive data that you NEED to keep on a computer and you hate having paper laying around the house.  Much of this type of data contains a great deal of important information that you do not want people other than yourself to have access to.  Encrypting your data is a great and perfect way to accomplish this security.  There are a few methods of accomplishing this, and that is using a hardware based encrypted storage which is fairly expensive or to you a software based encryption algorithm such as utilities such as TrueCrypt

Here are the articles I used to setup my OpenSolaris File Server:

http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-zfs-for-home.html
http://blog.experimentalworks.net/2008/03/setting-up-an-encrypted-zfs-wi...

Create Sensible Filenames

One thing that annoys me is when someone can't find a file because they didn't name it properly.   Here is an example of how I name customer proposals and documents

AcmeClient-05082009-Proposal-JobX.doc
AcmeClient-05102009-Quote-JobX.pdf
AcmeClient-05312009-Contract-JobX.pdf

This makes my documents straight-forward and easy to recognize what they are and when exactly the file was created.

Make an Archive Policy and Stick to it!!!!

I make a valid practice to archive any stale data that I'm not working with or do not deem to be working with in the near future into a .archive directory that the data will be put into a subdirectory names [Year]-[Month]  this way you do not have a bunch of stale data polluting your shares that makes you wade through the data archives.