Looking for a nice flash drive to do encrypted back-ups on it?
 

I'm tired of external HDDs, i'm thinking about getting 32 or 64GB flash drive and doing my back-ups on it.
But since i don't know much about them, have few questions :)

1 - How does the encryption work? I see that some advertise that they support encryption other doesn't mention anything. Does that mean that some have hardware support (and how does it work) for encryption? And for the others you will have to count on software and do it much slower?

2 - What software you would recommend for automating the back-ups as much as possible. For example auto back-up upon insertion of the drive of pre-selected folders would be great! Encrypted of course :)

3 - Can you split in couple of partitions (encrypted and not) any drive or you need to get specific one supporting it?


4 - Can you recommend a specific model that's small enough to fit comfortable on a key chain but is 32 or more GBs and good enough for the tasks?


Thanks :)

simply use Truecrypt and whatever drive you want.

I'm deathly afraid of keyloggers [hardware and software based] so if you are doing something really important, hardware based authentication is best. Use a LOK-IT drive ON TOP of TrueCrypt: http://www.lok-it.net/

Make sure you use a numerical PIN for the drive and use a alpha or alphanumeric password for the partition encryption [I don't even like using container encryption as temp files may be left over on the unencrypted partition.]

With this, if one method of crypto is cracked or key logged, the other *should* protect you.

ViaSat, a US Government Contractor manufactures KG-200 and KG-201, developed by the NSA, they use a hardware electronic memory key [something you have] with a numeric PIN [something you know]. More info here: http://www.viasat.com/secure-DAR

That way if your shot and killed or an "agency" intercepts or obtains your drive and KEY, they still need the PIN. KG-201's are protected against hardware tampering and bruteforce attack.

backups on Flash drives = FAIL

Oh damn... I over looked he wanted to use them for backups. Yeah I woulden't do that: It'll get expensive... fast and flash drives, over time, can be unreliable.

For this I'd buy a good quality RAID enclosure and mirror 2 hard disks, of same size, from different manufactures, powered on a line-conditioning UPS. I have a buddy that has about 7-8 external drives powered all thru his UPS all these years and NOT ONE has failed. A lot of hard drives failures can be contributed to power issues.

Hitachi hard disks are good in my opinion. I'd probably mirror to a Hitachi and Samsung.

If you can afford it, tape backups are still the most reliable media IMO and can now hold [from what I've seen] up to 800 GB uncompressed data on a single tape and support encryption.

this is what you want

http://www.kingston.com/flash/DT5000.asp

flash drives are slow, so to copy all that data to it will take some time
compared to external hard drives

just my 2c

Thanks Brad, that seems to be an interesting option.

Woj, would you care to argument yourself?

Why a memory with no moving parts would be more unreliable than a 7200 RPM HDD?

What about the SSD hard drives then, they are based on the same technology.

Also there are SSD based flash drives, like this one
http://www.lacie.com/company/news/news.htm?id=10607

Which also solves the speed issues.

What about them?

I've never heard of anyone backing up stuff to a flash drive...
one problem is the cost, the cost is at least 10x of a similar setup using hard drives..
another major problem is reliability, flash drives is a fairly new technology, they are less reliable than hard drives in my opinion... when something goes wrong it is nearly impossible to recover anything from them... hard drives on the other hand are usually recoverable...

combine low reliability and high cost = poor choice as a backup medium

Flash drives are easier to break then a normal hard drive.

The person who suggested a raid drive array is the best bet for long term data storage. With the best bang for the buck. In no time, SSD will be cheap and there will be better technology out there. but the disk array is a good standard for now.

SSD depending on how much you are backing up, is a quite expensive solution.

The industry standard for backup software is Symantec Backup Exec.