Planning for Emergency restore

[jerry <jerry@tr2.com>]

Hello,

   Been using tarsnap for a while.  In addition to my local backups, I 
do a tarsnap of all my business and personal data once a week.

   The other night, I was at a computer club zoom.  A presentation was 
given on computer security.  One really scary thing - ransomware.  A 
trojan encrypts all your files, and demands money to decrypt them.  And 
it encrypts EVERYTHING that your Windows computer has access to, 
including samba shares.

   Now, I'm pretty good at not loading trojans, but my family....less 
so.
The presenter ameliorates his risk every Saturday... He hooks up a NAS 
box, backs
up everything, and then disconnects it for the week.  I'm not fond of 
manual stuff, because sooner or later I fail to do it.  "Know 
thyself..."

   With a complete tarsnap backup, I could restore everything... but the 
big bad trojan might have encrypted the filesystem with my tarsnap key!  
Even though it's not a Samba share, and the directory is only readable 
by root, and the file is only readable/writable by root.   Actually, why 
should it be writable at all?  I'd never change it. "sudo chmod u-w 
tarsnap.key".

  Anyway, in that situation, the tarsnap key becomes VERY valuable.  I 
suppose I could stick it on some encrypted media and keep it somewhere 
else.  Friend's house?  What if my house burns down?  A disk in the fire 
safe would probably get fried, but what about a piece of paper?

   I just tried printing the key on paper.  I scanned the paper with my 
Fujitsu scansnap at max resolution.  Then converted the resulting PDF to 
a jpg with ImageMagick.  Then OCR'd it with tesseract.   No joy.  OCR is 
just not good enough.
Letters "l" get changed to numbers "1", extra letters appear here & 
there.... Just not gonna work.

   Ideas?  Right now, I'm experimenting with printed barcodes.

                     - Jerry Kaidor