My goals are:
Data Recovery - Backups
Data Redundancy - Data Mirror
Data Security - If someone gets physical access or posession to my Netbook or external drives, they can't get to my data.
It would probably help ( me included ) to see how I am covering this:
Data Recovery
User files and Settings are backed up by Acronis weekly
User files and are backed up to Truecrypt Volume "1" in Dropbox folder weekly
Archive data(old but I want to keep )is moved to Truecrypt Volume "2" on the external USB drive.
Data Redundancy
The Truecrypt volume "1" is on a local hard drive and in the dropbox cloud.
iTunes and picture ( Adobe lightroom catalog ) libraries are echoed to external USB drive weekly
The system partition is backed up as an image file every month. I have a spare drive that the image fits on it, the user partition would fit as well, minus some data like the picture and music libraries. They are on the External USB drive, though.
Data Security
The Acronis backups are password protected.
Truecrypt volume 1 is pass-phrase protected.
Holes In my Setup:
User data on the Netbook is not encrypted. If the data thief cannot login, they could put the drive into another system and probably get to it.
Archive data is not redundant
System drive image is not encrypted or at least password protected.
Thoughts:
This is more complicated than I'd like. Every week I have to connect the external USB drive, let Acronis do its backups, mount the Truecrypt volumes,run SyncToy jobs to sync the Dropbox and media libraries. Once a month I boot from the Acronis recovery disk and image the system partition. Whew!
If I increase my Dropbox limit so that the archive data will fit on it as well, then I could keep both in the same Truecrypt volume have a copy in the cloud as well.
Truecrypt volumes are not tied to a user id , or GUID. So I only need to provide a pass-phrase ( the longer the better ) to access the data them.
The whole reason for Dropbox is to make the data available off-site. I had some coworkers go work at a remote site in another country, and their passports were stolen. One did not have a digital copy of their birth certificate so they had to wait for weeks before they could go home. The other had a copy available online, and was one the plane home in a few days. I'd rather be the latter guy.
Finally,any advice on handling user data on the Netbook? I'd stick with Truecrypt if it can encrypt folders so that can just select which folders to encrypt and be done with it. Right-clicking a folder and checking "encrypt" in Windows Explorer is pretty tempting right now.