Hi all,
As self-hosting is not just “home-hosting” I guess this post should also be on-topic here.
Beginning of the year, bleeping-computers published an interesting post on the biggest cybersecurity stories of 2023.
Item 13 is an interesing one. (see URL of this post). Summary in short A Danish cloud-provider gets hit by a ransomware attack, encrypting not only the clients data, but also the backups.
For a user, this means that a senario where, not only your VM becomes unusable (virtual disk-storage is encrypted), but also the daily backups you made to the cloud-provider S3-storage is useless, might be not as far-fetches then what your think.
So … conclussion ??? If you have VMs at a cloud-provider and do daily backups, it might be usefull to actually get your storage for these backups from a different provider then the one where your house your VMs.
Anybody any ideas or remarks on this?
The real issue here is backups vs disaster recovery.
Backups can live on the same network. Backups are there for the day to day things that can go wrong. A server disk is corrupted, a user accidentally deletes a file, those kinds of things.
Disaster recovery is what happens when your primary platform is unavailable.
Your cloud provider getting taken down is a disaster recovery situation. The entire thing is unavailable. At this point you’re accepting data loss and starting to spin up in your disaster recovery location.
The fact they were hit by crypto is irrelevant. It could have been an earthquake, flooding, terrorist attack, or anything, but your primary data center was destroyed.
Backups are not meant for that scenario. What you’re looking for is disaster recovery.
Yes. Fair point.
On the other hand, most of the disaster senarios you mention are solved by geographic redundancy: set up your backup // DRS storage in a datacenter far away from the primary service. A scenario where all services,in all datacenters managed by a could-provider are impacted is probably new.
It is something that, considering the current geopolical situation we are now it, -and that I assume will only become worse- that we should better keep in the back of our mind.
I’ve thought about how I could handle disaster recovery for my homelab environment, but I haven’t come to any good solutions. For example, if my main concern was being hit by crypto. I can’t just recover from a regular backup, since I’m not sure how I can make a backup without that backup just being encrypted along side everything else. Since I mainly just backup everything to my file server, which is then synced to the cloud. In that setup, my cloud backups would be lost as well.
Would you have some starting points on how others handle disaster recovery? I’d like to avoid manually making an offline backup, because inevitably I’d forget to do it, which would make it useless anyway.
What cloud backup solution are you using? A lot of them offer additional protection that would keep a history of your files. You can essentially say “once a week create a point in time recovery of all my files” and then you could recover your files from that point in time.
This usually costs extra, and it makes sense why. They’re essentially keeping extra copies of your data for you.
How that is configured allows you to determine your RPO, or recovery point objective.
https://www.imperva.com/learn/availability/recovery-point-objective-rpo/
So you can decide how much data you’re comfortable losing by determining how often those point in time recovery events happen.
Did that make sense?
It does make sense. Thank you. I appreciate the link!
However, my cloud usage is purely as a proxy/load balancer, as none of my cloud providers hold any actual data. They’re just routing traffic, and all data/processing is on premises. What I’m interested in, is how to setup something like what you describe, but on premises also. From a design stand point, if I wanted to protect myself from a ransomware attack, obviously my cloud backups would be lost because they’re a mounted filesystem during a backup eventually. So I don’t know how to wrap my head around handling this, just storage design wise as specific tools I can figure out. How does one create a recovery point, and keep it safe from something like this? Just image the entire file system from a live booted offline environment? Feels like a chicken-egg problem to me.
So … conclussion ???
Have backups.
Only 2 copies of your data stored in the same place isn’t enough, you want 3 at minimum and at least 1 should be somewhere else.
Indeed. Whatever you put in a cloud needs backups. Not only at the cloud provider, but also “at home”.
There has been a case of a cloud provider shutting down a few months ago. The provider informed their customers, but only the accounting departments that were responsible for the payments. And several of those companies’ accounting departments did not really understand the message except for “needs no longer be paid”.
So for the rest of the company, the service went down hard after a grace period, when the provider deleted all customer files, including the backups…
Backups are usually encrypted from most popular backup programs, either by default or as an option (restic, borg, duplicati, veeam, etc…). So that would take care of someone else getting their hands on your backup data.
I never store my actual files on a cloud service, only encrypted backups.
For local data on my devices, my laptop is encrypted with bitlocker, and my Android phone is by default. My desktop at home is not though.
Its just some elses computer. Said this since the beginning
The issue is not cloud vs self-hosted. The question is “who has technical control over all the servers involved”. If you would home-host a server and have a backup of that a network of your friend, if your username / password pops up on a infostealer-website, you will be equaly in problem!
Easy, I always mirror my cloud. My setting is: cloud is extern and in my network there is always the same copy of everything on a simple smb-nas.
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My house burns to the ground (or easier, the NAS is broken) = online backup
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The online provider got hacked = No problem, I have an backup at home.
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The hackers burned my house down at the same time they killed my cloud = Well fuck.
PS. Since the most syncs are going directly to the cloud its just an rclone cronjob every night to backup everything on the NAS.
I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to all the self-hosters out there whenever Cloudflare changes their policy on DNS or their beloved free tunnels. People trust those companies too much. I also did at some point, until I got burned by DynDNS.
We start paying for static IPs. If cloudflare shuts down overnight, a lot of stuff stops working but no data is lost so we can get it back up with some work.
They’re just creating a situation where people forget how to do thing without a magic tunnel or whatever. We’ve seen this with other things, and a proof of this is the fact that you’re suggesting you’ll require a static IP while in fact you won’t.
Where I live, many ISPs tie public IPs to static IPs if they are using CG-NAT. But of course there are other options as well. My point was that the other options don’t disappear.
Though I do get the point that Cloudflare aren’t giving away something for nothing. The main reason to me is to get hobbiest using it so they start using it (on paid plans) in their work, or otherwise get people to upgrade to paid plans. However, the “give something away for free until they can’t live without it then force them to pay” model is pretty classic in tech by now.
