Horror Pictures

When I bought my first digital camera 10 years ago, backup wasn’t an issue. The 2Mpx point-and-shoot box created JPGs so small I could back up my photo gallery to a couple of CDs. Today, I use raw format, and I can easily have 10 or 20GB of material on the card when I get back from a Sunday outing. Even though not all of this ends up in my collection, I still have a fairly substantial amount of material to deal with. My works of art are stored on a small NAS box at home. But, I would additionally like to back them up somewhere outside my flood-endangered home. I was thinking of a cloud storage service like Amazon’s S3, and I would like to encrypt my photos when I store them.

While I was shopping around for a tool to do this for me, I stumbled across the S3QL filesystem [1]. S3QL splits my data into small blocks, encrypts the blocks, fires them off into the cloud, and stores them in an S3 bucket (Figure 1). “Bucket” is Amazon-speak for a leased storage slot.