— pg. 1 —
why we made this
most “encrypted” backup services know your name email card number IP address device fingerprint — basically everything except the contents of your files. and even those they sometimes still see, because the encryption is added on top of a credentialled session that already identifies you.
that’s not what we wanted to build. so we built a different thing.
private archive is a backup service that does not know who its customers are. you generate a certificate on your machine. you encrypt your files with restic. you send the ciphertext through tor. you pay in monero. that’s the whole product.
— pg. 2 —
the threat model
- your isp watching the wire? tor.
- us getting breached? attacker walks off with scrambled noise.
- a future owner of this company changing the rules? there’s no plaintext for them to inherit.
- a payment processor leaking your card? there isn’t one.
- you losing your client cert? your archive is gone.
- you losing your passphrase? your data is gone.
^^ those last two are features. a service that can recover your data is a service whose breach can recover it for someone else.
— pg. 3 —
how the bytes travel
you us
.--------. tor (3 hops) .------------.
| restic | =========== ⤳ =========== | scrambled |
| encr | | noise |
'--------' '------------'
^ |
|--------- you can pull bytes back any time ↩ ---------|
↑ restic encrypts the bits before they leave your laptop. we get scrambled noise. where we put the noise is, frankly, none of your business — and we couldn’t unscramble it for ourselves either way.
— pg. 4 —
how to actually use it
- download the client — binaries listed on pg. 5.
- run it.
privatearchive init generates a certificate. keep it safe (and backed up — in a different place).
- fund.
privatearchive pay prints a monero subaddress. send some XMR. pay-as-you-go — top up, burn down, no subscription, no monthly anything.
- back up.
privatearchive backup ~/Documents. you can put this in cron.
- forget. seriously, that’s the goal.
if any of that is unclear we have probably failed at our job. write us through the gitea issue tracker.