[tahoe-dev] protecting caps

[Greg Troxel]

Joseph Ming <josephming at ymail.com> writes:

[trimmed to recover from top-posting]

> The opposite question is also relevant I think: what extra precautions
> does tahoe take to protect the user from losing their root cap? If I
> understand the design correctly, without the root cap (or access to
> some stored cap somewhere) the user won't be able to access any of
> their data (or the portion of their data for which they don't have
> caps).

Yes, that's true.

> Assuming I store everything in tahoe and never share my caps with
> anyone else and then my harddisk where my cap was stored dies is
> stolen etc., have I lost everything? Is there some other way to try to
> recover my data, maybe by scouring all nodes involved in storing it
> for caps that belong to me?

Yes.  No (or it's a bug).

> Are users encouraged to save a copy of their root cap somewhere other
> than their harddrive? Is there any mechanism to help the user do
> something like that?

It seemed obvious to me that backing up root caps was necessary, just
like backing up encryption keys is necessary.  But if there is a
tutorial that should mention it and doesn't, I suspect a patch would be
welcome.

Normal backups of the disk, taken offsite, should help greatly.

Also, "enscript .tahoe/private/aliases | lpr" works.  At least, it
prints, but I haven't tried to type it in.


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