7MS #406: Securing Your Family During and After a Disaster - Part 4

Brian Johnson -

This episode of the 7MS podcast is brought to you by ITProTV. It’s never too late to start a new career in IT or move up the later, and ITProTV has you covered. From CompTIA and Cisco to ECCouncil and VMWare. Get a 7-day free trial and save 30% off all plans by going to itpro.tv/7MS

First and foremost, I hope you all are doing well and taking care of yourselves.

Today's episode focuses on disasters, which is unfortunately a very appropriate topic. As a quick refresher, our family had a fire a few months ago. It sucked. I talked about the day of the fire in this episode then did a "how do we get back on the grid?" episode here and then answered some of your FAQs here.

Regardless of if your DR plan includes fires, virus outbreaks, tornados or zombie attacks, it's important to have a solid plan for your family and business. So in today's episode I cover these main two topics:

A DIY $500 NAS + Unlimited Cloud Backup Plan

In trying to be more organized with my backup strategy, I set out to create a new backup plan with the following criteria:

  • Priced at ~$500
  • One on-prem array
  • Encrypted at rest
  • Backs up to cloud with encryption key I control
  • Unlimited scalable storage

I found my solution using this awesome video but I need to warn you about something right off the bat: the config in this video and in today's episode is not supported by CrashPlan because CP doesn't have a native backup agent that will run on the Synology NAS (at the time of this writing, anyway). With that said, here's the grocey list of things that make up my backup rig:

Once everything is up and running if you have any weird memory or "iwatch" errors, check out the troubleshooting section on the CrashPlan docker container author's GitHub page and that should get you totally taken care of!

Documenting your home/biz DR plan

I have a shared Google folder setup with my wife, and in that folder is a document called "In Case of Emergency." It details all the main things I take care of on the IT/security side for our household. I share in today's podcast how writing a document like that can be a big project.