Use TOR to create your own secure "cloud" drive

With everything seeming to be going back to much more of a 1970's style of network computing in terms of where the power lies in relation to the client/server, and the seeming need and demand for always-accessable network attached storage, I wanted something that wasn't owned by Google where I could store various things like PGP keys, system scripts and other assorted crap that would be handy to have.  I also wanted to be able to add to this non-Google-owned-thing.


In this post, I touch on how to enable remote access to any linux box running TOR.  Since we have SSH access to our home TOR router, we can use RSYNC over SSH to provide secure, encrypted file transfers (we could also use SCP, but RSYNCs ability to use compression and it's comparison/update feature make it faster).

torify rsync -azvhe ssh /local/dir user@remotehost.onion:/path/to/dir

I run the above to copy the contents of a directory on my laptop to my home NAS.  I use SSH shared keys so I don't get prompted for a password, autologin-tastic.  I also have it running as a cron job, currently just syncing my bookmarks directory.  Individual files I still tend to use SCP.