yon Leveron blog

Or at least, how to try.  One of the home machine’s primary partitions, when backed up with Acronis and no compression or encryption, was 24.4 gig in size.  Using 7zip, and making a nice solid archive, I ended up at 8.58 gig, spread out in (177, yep) 49.9 meg chunks to meet the 50 meg upload file size limit.

http://cid-c2e163eab4b150a0.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public?lc=1033

More experimentation, you actually can use a client such as Gladinet to push a backup over to Skydrive. You can use the “conserve bandwidth” option while actually using your computer, and crank it up before you leave

(edit – there’s been an upgrade to Gladinet, it’s actually even improved a bit more – was a good investment it seems)

windows live skydrive 25 gig free

I’m pretty confident in leaving things out there in public, as long as I got to choose the passphrase.  I’ve verified that 7 zip really does care if one character is off in a 200 char password, and it does use AES-256.  Luckily, my data doesn’t consist of anything important enough to expend that sort of resources in attempting to decode.

Reasonably good passwords / phrases can be generated by things such as https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm – as well, 7zip does have the option to encrypt the file headers as well. I remember a business case where someone thought that an old Winzip file was encrypted with their super-secret password (likely their dog’s name) and didn’t realize that anyone, without any password at all could read the name, size, etc. of each file within the archive.  Oops, that caused him some issues with their employees.

More pith – 7zip can use the “63 random printable ASCII characters” portion of Steve Gibson’s GRC password page, which is significant, bits-of-entropy wise, because

1;s[&Exv3[-?=c*zX;sgdkHn.J’Y;CWC$.y9ScB*xl’+e9′(G$^Uk\A@loZdiPM is a little harder to try to brute-force than

82FCB457CDB17D9E08F7A1A62BB798046373F9D89EF4DDDAC47224385F7D489 – while both may be 63 characters long in this case, the second string is not quite as “strong”.

Since you put up with the tech, ending with a nice random song lyric for you : Bloodhound Gang, “I’m the root of all that’s evil, yeah, but you can call me Cookie . . .”