Hacked! You Get 1.44MB—What’s Essential?

[dream]

Scenario: A mysterious hacker locks you out of your computer, your phone, and all your digital accounts but offers to send you a 3.5-inch floppy diskette of whatever essential files you need. You only have 1.44 MB to work with. What do you ask for?

Fun fact: You can fit up to 1 min and 30 seconds of MP3 audio or as much as 240,000 words (about the length of East of Eden) on a floppy. Transferring this amount of data used to take about 4 minutes over 56k dial-up. Today, it takes under 1 second.

[Memory]

i'd go thru my collection of both recorded and edited videos as well as photos and i'd crush each piece of media down to the lowest quality possible that's still watchable / viewable. i'd rather have quantity over quality. plus most of my personal media is over 1.44mb anyways. how? avif for images and av1 for video.

we do a little tomfoolery, but you gotta do whatcha gotta do if you're tryna preserve memories :)

[aketawi]

hmmm. judging by the size of all my encryption keys and other security info, i'd still have 1.2MB left, at least.

my zettelkasten on the other hand takes up 2.8MB, so i'm thinking i'll have to go through that and pick out some of the most important entries. there's plenty of useless info though, so wouldn't be too hard. i'd estimate that'll take up another 5-600KB

so with ~600KB left, i guess might as well preserve my website. images and whatever aside, pure html is 180KB and the database is 416KB, so that would just about fill up the floppy. worst case scenario i can prune some of the less useful stuff.

[BlazingCobaltX]

I don't know yet! I think compressing everything down is a good idea, but I still have to decide what I will compress. My full answer will follow...

my zettelkasten on the other hand takes up 2.8MB, so i'm thinking i'll have to go through that and pick out some of the most important entries. there's plenty of useless info though, so wouldn't be too hard. i'd estimate that'll take up another 5-600KB

Am I to understand you have a digital zettelkasten? Can you tell me more about your setup for that?

[aketawi]

Am I to understand you have a digital zettelkasten? Can you tell me more about your setup for that?

yep yep! it's just an Obsidian.md vault, where you can link between each zettel with [[wikilinks]]. it's probably not a "Pure" zettelkasten, since it doesn't use unique IDs and all, and more of a personal wiki, but i still treat it as such.

there's also other similar software i've been looking at, since Obsidian isn't FOSS. Emacs's org-mode and Neorg for Neovim jump out to me the most. there's also Joplin and Logsec but i just didn't like them as much.

[Gizmo]

The first thing I'd back up would be my website (which is around 60kb); then I'd stuff as many documents / coding projects as possible on it. They don't take up much space, and I'd rather have a few dozen important documents than like 4 pictures compressed within an inch of their lives.

[mipy]

honestly i think id preserve as much of art as possible , probably just the not uploaded pieces if this hypothetical hacker wouldnt delete all of my stuff , if so maybe i would tell my friends about the situation and have them archive the files for me - it sounds pretty like , dumb but i think i couldnt bear having so much of my art becoming completely and utterly lost . i think id obviously preserve things like passwords/general security info too , but thats not nearly as important to me as having all of my art stuff intact i think :,3 ESPECIALLY because for me some of these artpieces are the only remnants of a lot of friendgroups or obscure characters or important memories in general

[Cobra!]

As most of my important stuff is backed up online anyway, I’d only need my KeePass database file full of all of my account info. That way I can just get a new computer and just start again.

Maybe an xml of all of my Thunderbird RSS feeds would probably save me some time as well.

[Dequake]

Probbly all my Musescore projects, around twenty of them currently on my PC. When they're in .mscz format, compressed in a zip file, they'd probably fit on a floppy. Some of those projects are really old, I wouldn't want to lose them. Everything else is replacable.

[Dan Q]

I already keep all my most-important things in an encrypted  1.3Mb file on a pendrive that's attached to my wallet, with a backup copy stored in my fire safe and secondary copies on various devices (computers, phones, etc.). So it's pretty inconceivable that an attacker could lock me out of all of them at once already! But if they did, that file is what I'd need back.

Everything else important on my phone or PCs is already backed up to at least two places: my NAS on my LAN, and offsite (including old versions for up to a year), though presumably I'd have lost access to the latter if I were locked out (you can't lock me out of my NAS because I own a screwdriver and I'm sat right next to it... but let's pretend you did).

So yeah, I'd have that 1.3Mb file. So what is it that's so important?

It's a KeePassXC vault that contains:

• Passwords for all my accounts, which'll be helpful in getting back into things; also secondary copies of almost every "second factor" I use
• Scans of various forms of my ID including my passport and driving license, enabling me to prove my identity anywhere I need to reset credentials
• All of my product keys and serial numbers for any software I've purchased that requires one
• My SSH and PGP/GPG keys, allowing me to authenticate in a variety of ways (some of which I can use to get into some locked accounts)
• All of the details of all of my bank accounts including the cards, so I'm able to make purchases even if I've lost access to the physical cards or e.g. am locked out of bank apps etc.

So yeah... if I can get that 1.3Mb file, I'm pretty bulletproof! I hope!