Who hasn’t ever found the need to check something on the Internet, like bank accounts or things like that, and hasn’t done so because the wireless network wasn’t secure at all?
If you don’t trust your current connection to the Internet, you can always establish an SSH connection to a secure host (a VPS server or your personal home server) and use that connection as a real SOCKS proxy to surf the web as you do when you’re at home. Your network traffic will travel encrypted to your secure host and reach the Internet through your trusted connection at home or your VPS datacenter.
You only have to run the following command from the console of your laptop:
ssh -D 8080 -Nf secure_machine_running_ssh_server
Then, configure your browser to use 127.0.0.1:8080 as a SOCKSv5 proxy. Obviously, you can change 8080 to the port you want. If you want to be sure your connection is now secure, run a test to check your IP on any webpage like www.checkip.org. Compare the result with the IP you have if you don’t use the proxy.
When you have to backup a large amount of data, simple backups are a waste of time and storage space. In this situation, the most suitable option is to backup data incrementally. Although there are different methods, today I’ll explain how I use tar to keep my files safe.
With tar, an incremental backup consists of multiple files. The first one is a full dump of the data. This is a simple backup of the files as you would normally do. Simultaneously, the first time you perform an incremental backup it will be created a snapshot file. A snapshot file contains information related to the state of the data in a specific moment. With this information, later you can detect which files have changed and which ones have been added or deleted.