How I Manage My Digital Assets

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DevOps, Cloud, Kubernetes — personal tech notes by ChengQing Su

Most of us own multiple mobile devices and run into common problems: too many passwords to remember, weak passwords that are insecure, lost files when a device goes missing, and the hassle of working across devices.
In this post I will walk through how I manage my passwords, as well as how I handle file syncing and backup. Everything here is aimed at personal, non-commercial use.

Passwords

As a heavy internet user I sign up for a lot of websites, which means a lot of accounts and passwords. The problems pile up quickly:

  • Using the same password across all accounts is obviously insecure.
  • Using passwords based on a predictable pattern — such as personal information — is also insecure.
  • Not rotating passwords regularly is insecure.
  • When you have too many passwords, they become hard to remember and easy to forget.
  • Constantly typing different passwords on different devices is a real pain.

How do you solve all of this? A good password manager handles every one of these problems. Here are two I recommend:

1Password

Requires a paid subscription. 1Password is a password manager developed by AgileBits. It stores all kinds of sensitive information — regular login credentials, credit cards, software licenses, and more — in a PBKDF2-encrypted vault protected by a single master password.

LastPass

Has a free tier. LastPass is a freemium, cross-platform online password manager. Its goal is to cure “password fatigue” by centralizing all your passwords in the cloud. LastPass is primarily web-based but also offers browser extensions and bookmarklets for most modern browsers.

What I Do

I use 1Password. Here is a quick example of how it fits into my workflow.

After creating a Twitter account on my Dell laptop and saving the password in 1Password, whenever I want to access Twitter on my Mac (in Chrome) I can retrieve the password through the 1Password browser extension. When I want to log in to the Twitter app on my Android phone, I can get the password through the 1Password app there too.

1Password supports cross-platform use and syncs passwords automatically. It can also check whether a website is compromised and whether multiple accounts share the same password.

Since switching to 1Password, I honestly have no idea what my own passwords are — they are all randomly generated strings.

Files

I am not a serious photographer, but I do like snapping casual photos. The problems here are familiar:

  • No matter how much storage a phone has, it will eventually fill up.
  • A phone can be lost, taking all your data with it.
  • A phone can break, and data may be unrecoverable.

I also frequently write documents in Word, build spreadsheets in Excel, and work with engineering source files. The main pain points are:

  • If files are stored only locally, switching to another computer becomes inconvenient.
  • The computer or application can crash while you are in the middle of writing something.
  • A low-probability but real risk: hard drive failure.

For syncing and backing up photos, videos, and documents, the options generally fall into cloud backup or local backup. Here are the tools and services I recommend:

OneDrive

OneDrive (formerly Windows Live SkyDrive) is Microsoft’s cloud storage and online service. Users can upload files to Microsoft’s servers and access them through a web browser, edit and view Microsoft Office documents directly online, and use the desktop sync client to access and sync files locally. OneDrive also lets users control access via their Microsoft Account, choosing whether to share files publicly or restrict them to specific contacts.

OneDrive integrates extremely well with Windows 10 and Microsoft Office. On Windows 10 you can simply drag photos and documents into OneDrive. With an Office 365 subscription you get the Auto Save feature, which saves open files to OneDrive continuously. OneDrive also provides clients for multiple platforms, and the mobile app includes automatic photo upload.

iCloud

iCloud is Apple’s online sync, storage, and cloud computing service. It starts with 5 GB of free storage, with the option to purchase more. Users can store music, photos, app data, documents, contacts, calendars, and more in iCloud, and Apple pushes everything wirelessly to all iCloud-enabled devices — no cables required. iCloud can also store third-party app data and sync it across Apple devices.

If you are fully in the Apple ecosystem, iCloud is the perfect fit. It makes backing up app data, photos, and other content effortless.

NAS

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a dedicated data-storage technology that connects directly to a computer network, providing centralized data access to users across heterogeneous systems.

The two dominant NAS brands on the market are Synology and QNAP. QNAP generally offers higher raw performance, while Synology delivers a better overall user experience.

How Do You Choose?

In my view, where you store your data comes down to two questions:

  1. Can you accept data loss? If not, cloud services or a NAS with RAID are your best options.
  2. Can you accept a data breach? If not, a NAS is the safer choice — or encrypt your files before uploading them to the cloud.

What I Do

  • Office 365 Family subscription.
    Office 365 includes 1 TB of OneDrive storage. Whenever I work in PowerPoint, Excel, or Word I turn on Auto Save, so everything is continuously saved to OneDrive. When I need to prepare a presentation for clients, I usually work on it at home in the evenings — and I prefer not to take my work laptop home (I keep work stuff on the work machine and use my personal computer for personal learning). I can build the slide deck at home, it auto-saves to OneDrive, and the next day I can download the finished file from OneDrive on the office computer, or just present directly using Office Online.

    I also keep various checklists as Excel files. Even without a laptop nearby, I can view and edit them on my phone through the Office mobile app.

  • NAS
    I have two NAS units: one dedicated to my vSphere virtualization environment, and one for everyday personal use. Photos, documents, and notes all live on the personal NAS.

    I like using BoostNote for note-taking — mainly to record problems I run into at work or while studying. I have Synology Drive installed on both my Mac and Windows machines to sync those notes, so I can access them from home or the office and look up previous versions when needed.

    On my phone I use Synology Drive to browse files and Synology Moments to automatically back up videos and photos from the phone to the NAS. I can wipe and reset my phone whenever I want — all the important data is already backed up.

    The data drive on my Dell laptop is backed up directly to the NAS, so even after a full system reset I never have to worry about losing files.

    I also sync photos from the NAS to OneDrive, which lets me browse them through the built-in Photos app on Windows 10.
    Personal files I consider especially sensitive are encrypted and backed up to Synology C2.

Backup Tools and Services I Do Not Recommend

  • Baidu Netdisk. Slow speeds, and I have zero trust in it.
  • External hard drives / USB flash drives. I think of these as temporary transfer devices only. Portable storage is too easy to lose or damage.