- TeraBox offers 1 TB free online storage
- I don't trust TeraBox, so I encrypt all my files client-side (before I upload)
- Their reliability on uploading large files is terrible, so we split them into
100 MBchunks - They have an automatic backup feature for certain folders, so it retries on failure and automatically uploads new files or on file changes
- I've chosen
~/TeraBoxto be the working folder ~/TeraBoxis not backed up to TeraBox directly- In my TeraBox MacOS App, I have
~/TeraBox/My Picturesbacking up toMy Picturesin the cloud- NOTE: TeraBox duplicates the folder name you're backing up, so I chose the TeraBox root. I originally mapped the local
My PicturestoMy Pictureson TeraBox and it createdMy Pictures/My Pictures, which isn't what I wanted.
- NOTE: TeraBox duplicates the folder name you're backing up, so I chose the TeraBox root. I originally mapped the local
I'm running on a MacBook Air M1, but I don't think that matters. All of this should be able to be at least adapted for other OSes.
- zsh
- gpg:
brew install gpg - zip
- split
- cat
- sha256sum
- cut
- dupeGuru to deduplicate files (with special photo comparison)
- You can get perks by playing games in the Phone App which extend to Application installs, too, though I haven't found a way to play them on the desktop app
- Gold Miner, I think, is the most efficient way of getting perks
- Focus on getting the big Gold chunk at the bottom. It has a chance of giving you days of Premium service, which removes some of the limitations
- It's pretty easy and I find it a fun game to play and it only takes 60 seconds per game
- I installed the App before I had Premium features and am wondering if that had a big negative impact in certain ways.
- I had a lot of failed uploads just uploading unencrypted zip files. Was it getting nosy and failing to upload more reliably? I don't know. It was horrible until I started encrypting the files. But maybe it was in a weird transition state between free and Ultimate (still free via playing the games).
- Verify your computer isn't going to sleep, interrupting the upload
- Consider running
caffeinatein another terminal window - Apple > System Settings > Battery > Options... > Turn on
Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off
- Consider running
- I inserted an external backup drive which mounted to
/Volumes/Primary SSD/ - I decided to back up my pictures by year because I wanted to chunk my backups so that if one file in one of the chunks got corrupted, I could still recover other images.
Prepare original files (declutter, etc., dupeGuru for file deduplication) --> Zip --> Encrypt --> Chunk (100 MB) --> Test it (reconstruct from parts, decrypt, verify) --> Backup parts and sha256 hash to TeraBox
# The scripts expect to work out of ~/TeraBox
mkdir ~/TeraBox
# Prepare your folder for backup. I use dupeGuru to remove duplicated files/photos.
# Once these files are locked up, you're not going to be making changes unless you want to upload the whole batch (2024 in this case) again.
# Zip up a pictures folder, in this case, for one year
# This is chosen to limit the blast radius of one corrupted file
# Use the folder name here on out ast the name of the backup (2024 in this case)
./zip.sh /Volumes/Primary\ SSD/Important/My\ Pictures/2024
# We don't trust them, use the passphrase in the firesafe/aWallet Cloud
# Make sure you MANUALLY enter the passphrase from a printed copy at least once to verify you can decrypt if all you have is that physical copy
./encrypt.sh 2024
# Split encrypted file into 100 MB chunks
./chunk.sh 2024
# TEST THE BACKUP
# Reconstruct the chunks (creates a -reconstructed file)
./reconstruct.sh 2024
# Test the decryption
./decrypt.sh 2024-reconstructed
# Unzip the zip file and browse the contents, verifying files look as expected
open ~/TeraBox/2024-reconstructed.zip
# Backup the parts, sha256 hash file
./backup.sh 2024 'My Pictures' # Copies 2024-related files to ~/TeraBox/My Pictures, which TeraBox will automatically back up
# Clean up -- VERIFY!
# Unzipping my zip file created a Volumes directory
cd ~/TeraBox
rm -rf ./Volumes *-reconstructed* *.gpg *.zip
# Verify the files are getting backed up to TeraBox in the App
ls -lh ~/TeraBox/My\ Pictures/2024