Fellow selfhoster, do you encrypt your drives where you put data to avoid privacy problems in case of theft? If yes, how? How much does that impact performances? I selfhost (amongst other services) NextCloud where I keep my pictures, medical staff, …in short, private stuff and I know that it’s pretty difficult that a thief would steal my server, buuut, you never know! 🤷🏻♂️
Have you tried secure-erasing a disk?
Absolutely yes, I do enctypt my drives so I don’t have to ever do that again. This isn’t as critical for SSDs but it’s still a good idea. Even if you keep the key stored on the same system, securely deleting a tiny file is way easier than a whole disk.
Once /dev/urandom is enough. Who cares if a state actor could theoretically recover your media library in an expensive lab.
Even that takes a while.
And it has other benefits. For example a dying disk. You can just throw that out. I once tried to wipe such a disk and it’s a chore. It makes weird clicking noises and slows down to the point where it’d take years to overwrite it. Occasionally the SATA controller resets etc. And it won’t succeed at overwriting stuff. Sure I could go to the garage, get the power tools, put the hdd into a vise and delete everything with a combination of hammer and drill… But it’s much more convenient to have it encrypted and not care.
You take the disk out, drill once through it (use a metal bit).
Done.
Takes a couple minutes.
Takes me about 2 seconds with a 5lb steel mallet.
Bold of you to assume sysadmins can wield a 5lb mallet. (I’m not completely sure what that is in real world weight, 2 ½ kg?).
Sure. It’s just effort. I have to go fetch the power tools, fetch the drills, if I want to do it correctly also mount a vise or go fetch a piece of scrap wood and some clamps… After that clean up and remove the metal chips from my apartment…
At work I’d additionally need 3 training courses to be allowed to operate the drill press and visit the workshop. The whole process is going to take half a year. And it’ll still not be certified that the information is now gone.
In an enterprise setting, it’s probably a bit of a hassle with everything having to follow some kind of process…
Somehow they don’t trust the software developers with operating heavy machinery 😆
Anyways, I think we’re moving away from the topic… At work I didn’t encrypt harddisks anyways. They just put the servers into a special area in the datacenter that has a fence and a separate lock.
At home I just encrypt stuff so I don’t have to remember what I put where and handle things differently. Of course everything depends on the specific scenario and threat model. I have a bit of stuff archived on my server that isn’t around anymore, could be a copyright violation. I also have my complete life stored there, documents, finances, emails of a decade, pictures, backups for family members, passwords for emergency access to things. Admin stuff and logfiles that I’m required by law (GDPR…) not to share. I also used to travel a lot with my laptop in the backpack and that can get stolen. At some point a long time ago I decided to encrypt my harddisks and stop worrying. Since at least 10 years there isn’t any speed penalty anymore and it takes like 20 seconds to set it up on Linux…
But I can also see why not everyone wants to do it this way.
I’m still in the planning stage of my home network (we’re redoing the whole place so I’m doing a proper network) and TrueNas will be at the centre of it. So far, I’m not considering encryption (my laptops have /home encrypted though).
I’m not sure what the risk of a Disney raid on my server is. It could be a real thing, or not. It really depends on many things.
However, all in all, the lack of a proper solution for a quick server wipe beyond the usual thermite load, is problematic.