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tue posted: Tue 2016-06-07 13:50:35 tags: tech, backups
Try to check email; TBird reports my password is incorrect. Hotmail/Outlook/Live recently reformatted the web UX. Coincidence? I think not; there's a history of needing adapter Tbird extensions to pass credentials to Hotmail. Turns out MS added some switches in the web UX "settings" pages, and turned off POP3 access by default. My POP3 and SMTP server addresses were outdated too. To their credit, MS has gotten very good about showing the required server addresses and ports right there in the settings page. Was able to receive new mail, but Comcast blocks the common outbound SMTP port 25 so I was unable to test delivery outside the web interface.

Mount the Passport drive, copy my Truecrypt container into c:\backups, mount it as x:, load Cobian's "nightly" backup job. First thing I notice is the backup type is "incremental", and "differential" is grayed out. Second thing, Cobian reports "the engine is not found. please see the FAQ". Installed the service but set it to "manual" rather than "automatic" startup. Cobian doesn't start the service; it needs to be "automatic". Boo. If I reinstall it for "application mode", is it going to behave with scheduled jobs? I ended up powering up \\ghost to see what settings I had used there. Turns out I had installed Cobian in "application mode" on \\ghost after all.

Paths needed updating in the batch script and Mozbackup.conf I use for automating my Tbird message store backup, and I needed the 7-zip command-line program. Because of the change of My Dcuments folder mapping, I had to purge the local Truecrypt container to make room for the current backup set.

The most time-consuming test of solution was syncing the TC container to my Mega.nz space. Unofortunately, after uptaing the container with a couple of additions and re-syncing, I found Mega.nz does not provide "delta sync" (transmit only the changed bits of a file). Plus for some reason throughput degraded to tens, not hundreds of Kb/sec. At upward of 12 hours to re-sync, evidently I need to fall back to a less secure crypto scheme. So I cloned the Cobian nightly backup task but instead of backing up to a TrueCrypt container mounted as a drive, I backed up wth AES-256 encryption raw to my backup folder. With that kind of sample to test against, I suspect an NSA-grade cracking lab would make short work of accessing my files... but if I have hackers after me who are able to access my Mega.nz space, and resources to break the crypto on my files, and the time to attack my files instead of exploiting more easily-accessible targets, then at the end of the day they're going to be very disappointed with what they decrypt.