I've been amazed by the variety of thoughtful comments since I posted. I've read all those - and a bit more besides. I'm ashamed at my ignorance when I contacted the list last Thursday. I comfort myself with the thought that it's only from ignorance that you can ever feel complete knowledge could be in your grasp. The more you learn, the more it recedes.
I'm distrustful of the reliability of anything that has moving parts and paranoid of the Internet (but I suspect some level of paranoia is a prerequisite for hanging out here). Despite that I've become completely reliant on computers. I've also got two children - three and five who absorb my time like sponges. As their childhood slips by I try and capture the odd moment as naturally as I can (I'm no fan of the cheesy grin). The images are raw format from a Nikon. Much as my instincts are for simple, low tech solutions, they're the digital equivalent of negatives. Printing them out isn't really a solution. For the moment, I have no time to work on them. How they look when they come out of the camera is what I use. One day I hope to revisit them - I'm sure I can extract more value from this afternoon's dingy shot of B. peering out of the porthole in the side of a flying boat. The long term safety of these negatives is important to me. My distrust of the reliability of things with moving parts means I run two computers. I can work from either. They're almost mirrors (except one is Suse the other Fedora, one KDE, the other Gnome - [you need a bit of variety to spice things up]). I rsync from one to the other at the end of the day. If I make a mistake on one, then rysync will do its duty and replicate the mistake. The copy on S3 protects me from my own stupidity (and fire, theft...) My paranoia of the Internet makes me want to encrypt these copies (once something's out there, you can never get it back). For the moment I prefer the notion that I don't have to store the key anywhere - just a passphrase in my head - hence the use of symmetric keys. Anyway thanks for your patience and your ideas. When you hear from me again, I hope to be better informed! _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
